Teach kids to write

My oldest daughter had a terrible time learning to read because of some very bad teachers, poor faculty and frustrated parents. The ordeal with teaching her to read lasted through 5th grade and affected all of her school work. Math was always easy for her until they started doing story problems. Hooked on phonics, special help in school, and hours of homework with mom and dad every night made her problem worse not better. It finally took a lot of money and a special school to solve the problem that could have been solved with a couple of teachers who understood how to teach and a principal who listened when concerned parents went to him with a problem on many occasions.

I hated every time my child brought home a letter from the school telling us that her education was a joint effort with parents and the school. At first I thought they meant we had to make sure she showed up and was well disciplined. That was until I realized that they meant I should go back to college and get a degree in elementary education. Every time I went to them and told them that my daughter had a problem with reading they told me she was doing fine and not to worry. Unfortunately I believed them and let what was an obvious problem slide until it became a major problem that affected her entire life. It was really hard to see a child so young under so much pressure.

My daughter is doing great today and reads books like they are going out of style, which surprises me because of the stress it caused her for so many years. She, like most kids is very resilient and overcame her problem and never looked back. Okay this whole story is just about the fact that I came across a project that we have done a few times as a family that I thought everyone might like to see. These projects were a lot of fun and really helped teach my kids to write and enjoy writing.

Here's how it works. On Sunday night during our family meeting we would assign someone to write the first page of a story. The story could be about anything they wanted to write about (usually fantasy) and they had 1 day to write their page and turn it over to the next person. The next person also had one day to write their page and turn it over, and so on. The last person had to finish the story, which really was the hardest part because the first three would leave open ideas floating and they had to then sum it all up and give it an ending. These projects were a lot of fun and I would highly recommend that any family with young children undertake projects like this to help give your children an appreciation for writing. As you will see if you read the story it was clearly written by 4 different people and continuity was difficult, but fun none the less.

I really love computers and specifically software like Microsoft Word. All of our stories were written on Word which automatically points out both spelling and grammatical errors, which I think helps the kids to write proper English sentences. I am sure that some would disagree but I think it helps to see that there is an error and then you have to figure out how to correct the error. Both of my children have their own laptop computers that they do their homework and writing on, I believe it helps them long term with both writing and computing. Then I read some of the stuff my kids write on their blogs and I wonder if English truly is their first language. Yes that actually is true it seems if they think if it isn't going to be corrected then they don't have to worry about grammar, punctuation, or even spelling. So I slap em around a little and tell them to do better next time. I think that our writing projects gave them the encouragement to write their own blogs and have tons of fun doing it. My youngest started her blog in July 2007 and has already written 35,000 words on her blog in just 5 months. That is a pretty amazing number to me considering all of the other projects, school, and socializing that she has going on. The entire point is that as a parent you should encourage your child to write as much as they possibly can, they will benefit from it immensely in the long run.

If you would like to read the story it is called The whispering woods.