Your Child’s Writing Life: How to Inspire Confidence, Creativity, and Skill at Every Age
By Pam Allyn
This book by Pam Allyn is designed to help parent’s guide their children’s writing to help them become confident and proficient writers. This is an area that is frequently overlooked; many parents work hard to help their children become good readers but never think about writing. Allyn walks parents through the process of guiding writers, from birth to school age and into the teenage years. She stresses how important it is to get kids to write for enjoyment and pleasure, not just for school assignments.
She has an entire chapter where she goes through a child’s life age by age and describes what you can expect to see in writing, activities you can do that will help your child’s writing and books to read that will inspire them. I appreciate the fact that she gives very specific suggestions, including websites. I have already bookmarked a few to share with my 12 year old, like wordle.net and storycenter.org. Using the internet makes writing more appealing to my kids! She also includes writing prompts and ideas about how to springboard ordinary situations, like dinner at a restaurant, into a story.
There is also a great chapter that covers what to do when writing problems occur. Every child struggles with writing sooner or later, frequently with a school assignment. Her specific suggestions can help break through those problems. One of my favorite things in the whole book is her list of 9 things you can compliment your child’s writing on. I have been guilty of reading something one of my kids wrote and giving them the incredibly useless comment, “That’s good.” Many times all I do is go through and point out spelling mistakes, which isn’t exactly encouraging. She gives examples of sincere, but not overblown, things you can look for, like humor, sequencing, and interesting ideas. Encouragement and praise will keep children writing.
I think this book is very well done, and I will certainly be using some of the ideas from it to help my children become better writers. Since I am a homeschooler sometimes I fall too much into the idea that writing should be schoolwork, but this book has inspired me to try to make writing more fun, and less work.
Disclosure: I received a product for review, all opinions are my own.
Sounds like a great read!
Thanks for letting me know about this book. i just ordered it from Amazon and I hope it helps my husband with his 5th grade class.