Following on from yesterday’s support we will continue with how to support your child with writing in the early years. There are many processes taking place when your child is writing from thinking of ideas, getting the vocabulary and grammar and the transferring it onto paper, never mind the handwriting aspect too. Through this whole process your child is able to share what they have learned and what they know.
For today we will look at a few more ideas to help you to support your child with how to develop their writing skills and foster a love of writing.
- Help them to get started
Children can often find it difficult to get started and a blank page may be overwhelming for them. This is where you can help. You could give them the first few sentences or even words to help formulate ideas and thoughts for their writing. A good way to do this is to start with a question and then create a mind map or create a bank of words form their answer to the question. This could be: What did you see on your walk today? Who is the character in your story? Where is your story taking place? Allow your child to then free write using their thoughts.
- Connect their interests
Think about your child’s interests. What is their favourite story, who is their favourite character, what is their favourite activity or toy? Whatever their interests are connect them to their writing.
- Create Story Prompts
A fun way to do this is to cut out pictures from magazines with characters and settings on them. I have included a link for the story We’re going on a Bear Hunt with visuals for setting and characters that could support your child to write the story and sequence it.
These are a few more ideas to help you when supporting your child with writing and we will conclude with our final ideas on Tuesday. As always please get in touch if you have any questions or would like more ideas/resources for writing
Take care everyone,
Mrs Docherty
