Lately, as I was sipping a cup of coffee, penning down some thoughts in my diary, my little niece joined me with her mini-diary in her hand. At first, I thought she must be just scribbling some random words but to my surprise she had recorded the full evening in such beautiful words and pictographs. I was taken aback by her writing!
You never know how many budding writers/poets/creative directors we have among our preschool going children. All they need to hone their skills is a little nurturing right from the beginning. Here are some ways you can encourage your child’s creative writing skills.
Write:
Just how we say practice makes a man perfect; to refine your child’s writing skills, you need to make him/her practice writing more. Allow them to write essays on day-day incidents or simply read stories and summarize.
Grammar:
In today’s era of digital messaging apps, we are drifting from writing letters/email with proper punctuations. Encourage your child to write letters to friends/relatives as this will help them learn framing sentences, building paragraphs and better their grammatical skills.
Vocabulary:
Focus more on vocabulary. That’s how you can build strong communication. Give your kids good books to read to catch up on new words. Make him re-write a journal in his/her words.
Read:
Subscribe to kids’ magazines so your child gets more and more new stuff to read. Make reading an everyday habit.
Participate:
Look out for any competitions happening around. This shouldn’t be just limited to writing competitions but you can also look for story-telling or poetry workshops. Listening to stories broadens your thinking.
Start a blog:
Blogs are in these days! Encourage your child to write anecdotes for school newsletters or a short article that can be covered in their magazine. If you are exploring an online platform, your child can pen down his/her thoughts and post all her writings on this blog. This will give a good scope of improvisation as you can track/observe how his/her writing skills are growing.
Enroll into a writing class:
As you see your child’s writing advancing, enroll him/her into a formal writing class. Here, your child would learn the different types of writings. He/She will learn a host of write ups like a newsletter, a blog post, an anecdote, bulletin, letters and emails.
Author: Afrouz Sania
