Does your child have a ‘fear’ of writing? Is it enjoying writing, spelling and vocabulary, thinking and planning ideas or a mixture of all three?
In this blog, I’m going to share with you a few things that might be useful to try, both at home and at school, if your child has a ‘fear’ of a particular area of writing.
Writing comes with all sorts of challenges and I could talk a lot about this but I’ve come up with some ideas that I found really effective in class that you could use both at home and school when your children are tasked with doing some writing.
1. Vocabulary sheets – writing is not a test so we shouldn’t treat it that way. We also need to remember that a child’s vocabulary is limited because they have had limited life experience. We might be able to come up with ten words linked to autumn but for a child, that could be very tricky. So, when starting a piece of writing, I always provided children with a word bank of suitable vocabulary that could be used in their writing. Immediately, those who had a fear of writing and spelling felt more confident to write as they had words in front of them that they could then turn into sentences. You could even add some ‘joker’ words which have nothing to do with the topic to see if children can spot them and not use them.
2. WAGOLL – This stands for ‘What A Good One Looks Like’ and was created but the genius that is Pie Corbett, an English educational trainer, writer, author and poet. With this method, he suggested that you use a good, short story that has already been written as an example of how to write in that particular genre and then adapt it with your own ideas. There are many stages that go with this but essentially you could do this at home with one of your story books. Find a good page or short story (depending on how much you want to write) and read it a few times. Then create your own story literally by breaking it down sentence by sentence and write your own version. It looks like a very similar story but uses the children’s own ideas and makes them feel confident about how to write each sentence.
3. Using Pictures to Write – This is another great technique I often used in the classroom. This is all about using pictures that tell a story to use as inspiration for your writing. The Literacy Shed is great for this as they have a whole host of videos and images which you can watch to inspire writing. I would take screen shots of the video clip and ask children to order them correctly to tell the story. These pictures would then be used to help them write their own version of the story. Again, taking away the fear of having to think of story ideas and what happens first, in the middle and at the end, and they can instead enjoy writing little mini paragraphs for each picture.
I’d love to know if you try any of these and if they have an impact on your children feeling more confident with writing. Comment below with your thoughts.
