Writing skills are essential for a child’s educational and emotional development. Each person can cope with this type of activity in different ways: some people know how to write essay after essay without any difficulties, they are happy to write poems, and others may have significant problems even with writing a couple of lines. That is why parents should think about teaching their children to write essays and start training in elementary school. Together with experts who can provide online essay help, we have prepared ten tips on how you can help your child in writing essays.
General Essay Requirements
Essays are an integral part of the school program. Therefore, there are a number of requirements for writing this type of work:
- an ability to comprehend the facts necessary for writing an essay;
- an ability to observe, highlight the necessary information.
- selecting suitable words and phrases for the topic and genre;
- constructing sentences according to the laws of grammar;
- ability to construct a plan of the future work;
- an organization of the written work according to the plan;
- an observance of spelling and punctuation norms of the language.
Why do you need a plan?
Many children are bewildered when they ask why they need a plan when it is already clear what to write. The teacher and parents’ task is to explain to the student that without a plan, the essay will not work. Or rather, it will be a text with a chaotic expression of thoughts. Properly made creative work should be structured so that the reader could easily understand what he/she reads, and the topic was fully disclosed. So it is easier to write an essay if there is a plan. Usually, it consists of three parts: an introduction, the main part, and a conclusion. In the introduction, the choice of topic should be reasoned, in the second part, the essence of the work should be explained, and in conclusion, the results of all the above should be summed up. For each genre, these parts are supplemented following the recommendations of the teacher. Having learned to work with the plan, the child will be able to cope with writing an essay quickly.
Fundamentals of writing an essay
In order to write an essay successfully, a child must have a basic knowledge of spelling and grammar of the language he or she is studying according to his or her age. If a child lacks this knowledge, you will embarrass them even more by teaching them several skills at once. But, unfortunately, the realities of modern life do not always allow us to follow this sequence of learning. It is also necessary to keep in mind that elementary and secondary school-age children find it a little more challenging to express their thoughts according to some rules, structure, or plan. The written side of speech has no quality of spontaneity, such as oral speech, so children can think about what will be “said,” which helps the child develop.
It is especially important that the teacher or parent who aims to teach how to write an essay knows what the essay will be about, not just how to write it. The best preparation for writing an essay for your child will be the organization of a trip, excursion, or hike for greater visibility and the formation of real impressions, as well as collecting material. Otherwise, children will not be able to express their opinions and will use learned phrases, clichéd speech, just describing the picture in front of them.
How to teach to write an essay?
- Depending on the topic, you should select a possible list of words that children can use when writing a text, as well as to enrich speech with new lexical units. It would also be a good idea to read more on a given topic as a preparation (poems or stories) or listen to music. They will provide more opportunities for self-realization and inspiration. After all, we know that all children are different and they have peculiarities of how they perceive information better (visually, by hearing, or by touch) and the development of imagination is of special importance;
- To pay attention to children to those objects or people which will be discussed during the preparation. Ask questions to children, ask to describe what they see;
- Ask for children’s opinions and to share their impressions. At the same time, it is necessary to write an essay plan and consider possible difficulties with understanding new words;
- You should also pay attention to the fact that written speech differs from oral stylistically. It will be useful to teach the differences in stylistics of the language when working on writing. Listen to children’s oral answers and correct possible stylistic flaws;
- Listen to children and help them find the most accurate and memorable words to describe their emotions;
- Talk about syntactic design. If a child is in elementary school, all sentences will be short and straightforward. With age and development of speech, it is necessary to teach how to complicate structures and to introduce complex sentences;
- Avoid repeating words. To do this, you should first talk about synonyms for a word or other ways to convey the idea;
- To prevent repetitions in the first stages of training, it is recommended to start with a collective writing one general essay, then write two individual ones with further analysis. If you teach your child something that can ruin his essay and work from the very first texts on typical mistakes, the successful results of work will not make you wait;
- In some cases, it is important to work through the whole sentences. To do this, you can use teamwork when you work together on how to fix and improve this particular essay. Collective work on a text helps to avoid typical mistakes in the future and can teach criticism of what is written;
- For older children, it would be far from superfluous to explain that the huge number of epithets, metaphors, and quotations taken directly from other sources (books, the Internet), especially verbatim copying of other people’s thoughts, would not be considered as successful completion of this creative task.
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