17 Ways to Improve Your Child’s Writing: Tips #1-7

By Terri Hessler

It might surprise you to find out that one of the last large writing studies conducted determined that students spend very little time in school on paragraph-length or longer writing (Applebee, 1981). It is common for longer writing pieces to be assigned to be written out of class because of the time constraints of the classroom. Without providing students time to write in the presence of an instructor or peers from whom they can gain feedback, direction, and/or support, students miss out on the social aspect of writing and opportunities to improve their writing. It is clear to me that I’m going to have to supplement the writing experiences of my child throughout her academic career so that she is prepared for the rigors of college writing. Here is a list of ways to improve a child’s writing as she progresses through elementary and middle school. I think that summer is an especially good time for supplemental writing activities because it promotes the maintenance of an academic routine.

Most of these tips are grounded in a finding from a large scale study conducted on written expression outcomes during the 70’s and 80’s. Hillocks (1986) found that longer writing received higher scores/grades/marks than shorter writing. Unfortunately, many students with written expression deficits write very little. While it is counterproductive and naïve to think that writing more words will produce a better writing piece, it is the first step in getting students to write higher quality pieces. These tips can be easily implemented at home and center primarily on the idea that writing more helps children (and adults) write better. If you are interested in improving your own writing, several of these can be adapted for your use (e.g., #1, #3, #6, #7, #8, #12, #13, #15). Next month’s column will contain the remainder of the tips.

1. Schedule daily writing time
Get your child used to the idea that a writing assignment doesn’t necessarily have to be completed in one sitting and that, in fact, it may seem less insurmountable to “attack” a writing task a little bit at a time for several days instead of all at once.

2. Use fully developed prompts
Providing explicit instructions will both increase the amount a student writes and the quality of the written product. A typical writing prompt might read something like this: Write a 3-5 page paper on the use of submarines in the Civil War. This type of prompt gives the student little direction and encompasses a topic so large as to be daunting. How much more focused and organized the resulting paper would be if the student is instructed instead to write a 3-5 page paper on the use of submarines in the Civil War. Be sure to include information on a) how submarines were constructed at that time in history, b) which side utilized them to a greater degree and did either have any help from other countries, and c) how the outcome of the war might have been different without them.

Even for younger children, providing direction/advice in the prompt can be helpful. Tell about a time you were embarrassed could be replaced with Tell about a time you were embarrassed. Who was around? Where were you? What happened?

3. Teach your child to self-graph
Self-graphing the number of words written can be motivating for some students (Brigham, Graubard, & Stans, 1972). A child could also count and graph number of correctly spelled words and number of new or different words. Public posting of graphs could encourage him or her to beat previous scores for a “personal best.” Friends and relatives (e.g., grandma, primary teacher, older brother) can be recruited to notice and praise “personal bests.”

4. Teach strategies with mnemonics
Many writing process strategies involve easy-to-remember mnemonics that can be posted on a wall or ‘fridge, or printed on laminated cards for portability. Some examples are:
TREE
develop Topic sentence
include Reasons to support premise
Examine the soundness of each supporting reason
create an Ending for the paper (Graham & Harris, 1989)

PLAN
Pay attention to the prompt
List main ideas
Add supporting details
Number your ideas (De La Plaz, 1999)

For simple editing, teach children to use COPS for checking
Capitalization
Organization (paragraphing)
Punctuation
Spelling

5. Let child choose own topics
Allowing students to write about what they know may result in more text and in students caring more about the final product.

6. Use a topic jar
For some kids, deciding what to write is a big part of the problem. For them, use a large mouth Mason jar to hold writing topics written by both kids and adults. There are various commercial products available that provide lists of writing topics (e.g., The English Teachers Book of Lists). Allow child to both add to and pick from the jar.

7. Support and encourage brainstorming
The more time spent actively brainstorming, the better the finished product likely will be. Brainstorming can be adult-directed and merely conversational, or it can be more structured by using various graphic organizers, like webbing/bubbling, T-charts, or Venn diagrams.

Vocabulary development

By Terri Hessler

Two researchers in the early ‘80s (i.e., Morris and Crump, 1982) discovered that students with learning disabilities were more likely to use fewer different words in their written expression than students without disabilities. They surmised that a lack of spelling ability could account for this, i.e., students with disabilities were more likely to use words they knew how to spell than “new” words, resulting in a repetition of easier-to-spell words. For example, a student might write the following:

I wulked to the store I din’t care. I wulked rite passed a big dog. I din’t see the big dog. I all most fell. He was a nice dog.

Other research (e.g., the body of work by Hart & Risley) indicates that the number of words a student is exposed to before the start of school correlates with 3rd grade academic achievement (i.e., higher number of words means higher academic achievement). So, to go back to the Morris and Crump study, perhaps students who are using fewer different words do not have a rich vocabulary from which to draw. Of course, Morris and Crump do not indicate if the students who used fewer different words had a richer oral vocabulary than their written expression indicated. Interestingly, it is quite common for students who are identified with disabilities and who have deficits in written expression to tell stories and give verbal descriptions using at- or above-grade level vocabulary that does not seem to appear in their writing pieces. Such a student might tell the story in the example given above like this:

“I strolled to the store casually, not caring about anything. I walked right past a mammoth of a dog (a Harlequin Great Dane, I think) without seeing him because I was absorbed in my thoughts. I almost tripped over him, but he didn’t even growl. That dog had a calm disposition.”

Notice that not only is the vocabulary more varied and advanced, but the description is longer and more involved. Shorter writing pieces are a classic characteristic of students with disabilities, especially those who have deficits in written expression.

So the short and simple message for this month is to help your child develop a better vocabulary and help him or her to learn to spell the words he or she uses.

One way I do the former (i.e., develop better vocabulary) with Carmi is to talk, sing, and read to her as much as possible. The landmark longitudinal study by Hart & Risley isolated as many variables as possible to determine that the number of words a child hears by the time he/she is 3 correlates with 3rd grade academic achievement. By doing so, the results showed that there is a 30 million word gap in the number of words a child of low SES (socioeconomic status) is exposed to compared to a child of high SES. Education researchers have long known that districts with high numbers of poor kids have lower achievement outcomes than students in more affluent districts (e.g., Columbus Public Schools compared to Upper Arlington City Schools). My translation of this is not that people need to be in high SES before having kids or even that they need to move to UA or Bexley or Dublin or New Albany before their kids start school. The take-home for me is that I need to make sure my child hears as many words as possible by the time she turns 3.

I knew of this study when we first brought Carmi home, but I didn’t get serious about it until she was about 6 months old. I just couldn’t get used to talking, singing, and reading to a being who didn’t reciprocate in some way. My bad. I lost a lot of time, I think. Fortunately, Russ is an incessant talker so I think he is more than making up for lost time. Take note: Television doesn’t count! There has to be interaction along with the exposure to the words.

For the latter (i.e., learn to spell the words she uses), I haven’t read the research on this. I’m not even sure there is research on this. So what I’m doing is helping Carmi become familiar with word families. One of our favorite programs to watch with her right now is Super Why? on PBS. In this show, one of the main characters is Wonder Red (in reference to Little Red Riding Hood, I think) who has Word Power, which is essentially an affinity for word families, such as ar words like far, car, jar or at words, like mat, cat, bat. So Carmi and I (and Russ does this, too, so there’s consistency) will occasionally sing the song on the show with new words. I know you won’t be able to imagine the tune, but if you go to www.pbskids.org/superwhy you might be able to find it there, but also watching it just once (9 a.m. on ch. 34/WOSU) will cause it to stick in your head (it’s one of those kinds of jingles). Just pick a word (one syllable works best), and think of another word that rhymes with it. I’ll use the word cap. A word that rhymes with cap is tap. The lyrics go like this: “Cap, tap, cap. Wonderific, you’re terrific, cap, tap, cap, wonderific, you’re terrific, cap!” After Carmi and I sing the song, I try to think of and say as many of the words in that word family as I can (e.g., flap, gap, lap, map, nap, rap, sap). I try to do this when I’m in the car with Carmi, because I tend to gravitate towards listening to talk radio, which probably isn’t much fun for her. It’s also a better alternative for me than tapes of kid songs, which I can only listen to one or two time through before my ears start to bleed.

I try to remember to connect all the phoneme practice with anything we read. I’m not very good at that, but I’m trying. And I’m certainly not systematic about it either. She’s only just now starting to say a lot of words spontaneously so it might get to be more fun as she joins in.

I also try to work on phoneme practice every chance I get. This will help her be ready to read, but I also believe it may help with spelling later. Phonemes are simply the smallest sound segments in our language, like the sounds the individual alphabet letters make. According to some research that I find compelling, it’s more important for a child to learn what sounds the letters make than to learn what the letter names are. The way I give Carmi extra phoneme practice now is in the bath tub with foam letters. I’ll hold up the letter C for example, and then I’ll say (very enthusiastically) something like “This is the letter C, Carmi! Your name starts with C! C makes the /k/ sound. Can you say /k/?” Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t. It’s a very low pressure activity, and I do my best to make it a short activity and fun.

Introduction to "Write On!"

By Terri Hessler

I'm a bit of a writing freak, as any of my former students (college, high school, or middle school) will tell you. I think it is a critical skill for two reasons. First, effective communication is just plain efficient. Say what you gotta' say (or in this case, write what you gotta' write) and if you do it with correct usage and mechanics, you save the reader time and effort in receiving the message. With the advent of electronic communication, that concept has not changed. If anything, it is more important because writing as a form of communication is more commonplace than it ever was. Sure, my parents wrote letters to each other once a week while Dad was stationed in Germany at the end of WWII, and people regularly sent various other kinds of mail (what we call snail mail now) but nowadays, people blog, email, text, chat, and greet (with electronic greeting cards) daily or in many cases, hourly! These participants in the modern-era writing community are more numerous and younger than they ever were in the era of snail mail. Though the mode of writing has changed, as well as its form, it still serves the same function: communication. And now, more than ever, people write what they want to communicate in more concise ways. Text messaging is the perfect example of this. I love it that text messaging seems more popular than phone calling! The "power of the pen" may have been replaced by the non-QWERTY cell phone keypad, but the word still rules, even if the word is now a mishmash of letters and symbols.

The second reason I think writing is a critical skill is because I believe that writing is a tool for learning. I know this to be true from my own experience as a student (and I've got many, many years of that experience) and as a teacher (11+ and counting). There is nothing more useful to me when trying to get my brain around a concept than writing about it. Writing helps clarify my position/viewpoint/understanding (or lack thereof) on complex—and maybe not so complex—topics. I can't explain how it does, but it does. I would guess that writing makes me use a cognitive function not otherwise accessed or maybe use cognition in a different way. All I know is that writing about something leads me to a fuller understanding of whatever it is I am writing about. It is because of this reason (that writing is a tool for learning) that my research focus is improving written expression in children with deficits in that area, particularly students with learning disabilities and those at-risk for being identified with learning disabilities.

I learn a little bit about writing by the research I do, but I learn a lot more by reading the existing research literature in my field. I like it that I can share what I learn with people I know so that it can help them if they have children who struggle with writing. This blog is another opportunity for me to do that. Every month or so, I'll share a strategy that can help improve written expression specifically, and academic performance in general.

In this column, I'll share that the commonly accepted adage that "practice makes perfect" applies somewhat to written expression in as much as it's perfect practice. Thus, my mantra is "perfect practice makes perfect." It's not very efficient to practice errors, which is what students do who produce a lot of writing but do not get any or much feedback. So, while it's good to write a lot when you're learning how to write, someone needs to be giving lots of positive feedback as well as targeted corrective feedback. Since church leaders have consistently encouraged journal-writing, members have the perfect opportunity to have their children practice a gospel principle while improving an academic skill. Maybe you could have a family journal that everyone takes a turn writing in, perhaps a different person each week. During family home evening, that person can read their journal entry aloud to their natural audience. Later in the week, in private and one-on-one, a parent can give lots of ebullient praise and target one item for improvement. Perhaps there's a word that was misspelled, or a comma misused, or a word not capitalized. Have the child correct the error right there in the journal and encourage him or her to pay attention to that skill the next time.

Many people are uncomfortable with this kind of attention to correction, to which I say, "Pshaw!" If you were teaching that child to play the piano, you would correct a note delivery error. If you were teaching that child to swing a baseball bat, you would correct his or her swing form. Why are academic skills any different? I say they are not, and in fact, are more critical. We don't need to fear harming our child's self-esteem with correction as long as it's delivered matter-of-factly and with kindness. I argue that a child's self-esteem improves with success, not vice-versa.

That's all for this month; write on!