However, when a child’s interest and motivation are there, that child can often pick up concepts and skills rather quickly. He or she does it simply because it is required. In fact, in most cases, the child isn’t terribly engaged in this sort of practice.
Many of us who grew up in schools have unwittingly become convinced that a person needs this sort of routine practice in order to learn skills such as writing.īut adult-driven, routine-practice learning rarely takes a child’s interest and motivation into account. The teacher can’t be aware of learning that happens outside of the classroom, in daily life all learning gets focused into a lesson format. The assumption is that the child will learn the multiplication table, or the rules of grammar, or the parts of the body if he or she works at them repeatedly. Practicing small pieces of a larger skill day after day is a way of ensuring that a large group of children will eventually learn that same skill. The concept of learning through routine practice is mostly a school notion. Kids don’t need daily, or even weekly writing practice. Digital writing drives the world they’re growing up in, after all. Taking dictation is also helpful for older kids who are reluctant writers, or beginning a challenging project.Īlso, when kids struggle with physical writing, it can be helpful to introduce keyboarding as an alternative. Meanwhile, their mechanical skills can develop more organically than they might in a classroom, as the child makes signs for lemonade stands, labels for rock collections, dialogue bubbles for comics, keep out signs for bedroom doors. Young children tend to have lively, expressive, imaginative speaking voices transcribing their words to the page or screen allows them to develop a vivid writing voice at a very young age. This allows them to say more, express higher-level thoughts, and use richer vocabulary than they’d be likely to if required to write on their own. Kids needn’t actually transcribe to get their thoughts on paper and screen: they can dictate their ideas to a willing adult. On the other hand, if you focus first on what the child wants to express, the mechanical skills will fall into place over time. When the power of a child’s motivation isn’t behind it, mastery of mechanical skills can seem like insurmountable acts of drudgery-which is why so many kids learn to dislike writing. Learning to write is hard, perhaps one of the most challenging tasks a young person will undertake. There’s no reason for a homeschooled child to take on these skills at such a young age. Schools push kids to write at six and seven because written communication helps teachers track the progress of twenty to thirty students. The how of writing takes precedence over the what words-on-paper skills matter more than what a child has to say. Often, these skills are emphasized over developing written self-expression. So much “writing” time in school is spent learning the mechanics of writing: penmanship, spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Kids don’t need to master the mechanical skills of writing before developing voices as writers. How can kids learn a skill as complicated as writing if it isn’t forced upon them? Here’s what my kids and my experiences have taught me.
Writing is an area that seems to prickle at the doubts of homeschooling parents-even the most radical unschoolers. They come from twenty years spent trying to make a writer of myself. They come from a dozen years of facilitating writer’s workshops for homeschoolers-a dozen years of word-tinkering with kids.
They came, instead, from fifteen years spent homeschooling with my own kids-now nineteen, sixteen and ten-and watching them become writers. These notions didn’t come from my school experiences as a kid, or my years as an elementary school teacher.
I have some radical notions about how kids can become writers. Originally published in Life Learning Magazine, March/April 2012 Since the article morphed so substantially from the blog post–and since Life Learning Magazine has moved on to its May/June edition–I though I’d share it here.īonus points for those who answer the questions posed at the end. The first half, in fact, was completely reorganized into a list of what kids don’t need to write–a nice counterpoint, I thought, to the original conclusion of what kids do need. Since the original post was a bit off-the-cuff and, well, bloggy, I rewrote parts of it for publication. It also managed to capture the attention of Wendy Priesnitz, editor of the always insightful Life Learning Magazine, who asked to reprint it. Back in January, I wrote a rambling, terribly earnest post titled How Does a Child REALLY Learn to Write? That post generated a slew of thoughtful and heartfelt comments.
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