I am a big believer in working with a child’s natural development and not against it. For that reason, I teach writing at a slower pace than the current public schools do it. While it is helpful to go slower with this skill if your child has learning disabilities or delays, there are other reasons that even typical kids can and should go at a slower pace with writing skills.

Complexity

First, let’s talk about how writing is not a simple task. To write even a short sentence, a child needs to have mastered several skills. They need the strength and coordination for handwriting. Skills in language to compose the sentence are needed. The child has to have the ability to remember the sentence they came up with and remember how to spell the words they need. For many elementary school kids, their verbal vocabulary out paces their written one. They cannot easily spell any word they think of, so the skill of writing a good sentence can be very difficult. On top of all of this, they are expected to use proper grammar and sentence structure.

For most elementary  students, having them tell you about a topic while you take dictation can accomplish far more in the way of building real skills than having the child try to write a longer assignment.

Mediocre Writing

For many kids, the task of writing an essay or paragraph is overwhelming because those skills I listed, have not solidified. I would urge parents of elementary students to work on better and better sentences at this age. Holding a single sentence in your mind is not insignificant. Working on adding adjectives and adverbs to make a simple sentence more robust, builds good skills.

If you try to skip ahead to paragraphs, what often happens is that kids learn to write with in their skills and abilities. This means they edit their word choice to be words they can spell. They choose to use fewer adjectives because they don’t want to write them. Let me give you an example.

Little Megan is 8 years old and assigned to write a paragraph about her favorite animal. Her real favorite animal is the African Elephant, but she isn’t sure how to spell either of those words. As she thinks about this paragraph that requires five sentences, she also realizes there are other words she would like to use but can’t spell, like savanna and herbivore. Yes, she could ask for help with all of these words, or go look them up, or she could choose an easier topic. Instead of putting in effort to write about her level she instead creates this paragraph:

I like cats. Cats are cute. My cat is black. Cats like to play. Cats eat cat food.

This is technically five sentences. It is five very simple, easy to write sentence. It is also a pretty horrible paragraph. It is what we expect kids to do when we first assign paragraphs and even essays in elementary school. If Megan instead did the assignment orally, she could tell us far more with a much bigger vocabulary than she is limited to right now when forced to write it down.

Delaying Writing

Am I saying children’t shouldn’t be taught to write before middle school? No, not at all. But I believe strongly that the elementary years should be spent laying a foundation. Have children do copy work to learn to write neatly. Do a spelling program so they have a lot of words they can easily spell and write when they are older. Have them talk to you about what they are reading or learning. Great essays are based on good verbal language skills. Read them wonderful books, so their vocabulary grows and grows.

When they are ready, work on having them write great sentences. Instead of spending years writing mediocre stuff, slow down and let them write small amounts of high quality work! Far better than Megan’s horrible cat paragraph would be a single sentence with a better vocabulary and sentence structure.

African elephants graze on the savanna; where they eat plants because they are herbivores.

See how much better that is? Most eight year olds are not ready to write a sentence that robust, even if they can tell it to you. But I would rather my kids be able to write a single excellent sentence like that than the mediocre paragraph about cats. That means we work on writing good sentences instead of getting excited about needing to create paragraphs so young.

But They Will Be Behind!

Behind who? The public school kids who are burning out at faster and faster rates? Why are those kids in school so exhausted? Because they are forced to do things before they are really ready. Yes, you can push kids to overachieve, but there is a point where they hit a wall.

Instead of working so hard to go at such a fast pace, slow down. The real goal, is that your child can write essays before they graduate high school. This means that in a very real way, you can work on sentences in elementary school, paragraphs in middle school, and not do essays until high school. And if you do that, their essays will be amazing. They won’t have learned to cut corners. They won’t be sick of writing about boring topics that sucked out their joy.They will start essay writing with the skills they need to be able to actually create a good essay. All those years of spelling and grammar and verbal discussions will have given them the tools to be writers.

How Do I Know It Will Be Okay?

I have two kids who didn’t write longer essays until upper high school, eleventh or twelfth grade. Both are getting A’s in their college English classes. Each had a very different method and program to get them there. We went at their pace. I worked with them on developing all the skills they would need, but we didn’t put them together until they were ready for that step. But we got there!