YOUR CHILD'S WRITING LIFE
How to Inspire Confidence, Creativity, and Skill at Every Age
By Pam Allyn
Publisher: Avery
This book is written by educator and literacy expert, Pam Allyn, whose mission is to get kids to communicate with the world through words. She starts off with academia, telling readers why it is important that kids write.
My favourite part of the book is when she talks about the 10 stages of writing development for children.
These key stages will help parents and educators aid the child appropriately, and also recognise the different nuances of a child’s writing at every stage. The stages start with talk/listen/talk look, which is the initial communication between parent and child, building the child’s capacity for language, and goes right on to making paragraphs and everything in between.
Then she breaks down writing ability by age group, another important element to note. Under each age group, she pre-empts you on what writing elements to look out for, and suggests writing activities and books for it. For example, from birth to age two, kids respond to books with babble, and a great activity would be to read aloud to them. From two to three years, they start forming imaginative play and can identify and name things. She goes right on to age nine.
She talks about parents' role in nurturing the writer, and gives you the right tools to help you along the way. There are a lot of “free-writing” activities, ones that will not hamper a child’s budding creativity.
There is a useful section called Nine Reasons to Compliment Your Child, which is a great eye opener if you’re working with young children. Things that we take for granted are actually very important parts of writing development. One of them is thinking on the page. Praise your child for her ability to convey an idea to you through her work. If she is writing about an adventure in some imaginary land, praise her for the great idea. If she is writing about her day in school, tell her that she is great at telling you about what she did.
Another reason to compliment is when your child alternates between internal and external narration. This is when she relates what her character is thinking, and then puts that thought to action. Even things like drawing thought bubbles reflects this sophisticated narrative.
When your child starts to recognise the different types of writing – for example, a newspaper report feels different to a fairytale, that is also another milestone to celebrate.
Read these nine reasons and consciously apply them when you are helping your child to write.
She also recommends books for your child to read, and gives a rundown on why she loves each one. She chooses these based on the powerful stories in them and the beautiful language used, that your budding writer can take inspiration from.
At the end of the book, she suggests 50 writing prompts that can be used across all ages. She segregates the activities by age, and for each activity, she recommends a book that has a similar style of writing. For example, under the writing prompt: What to write when you’re anxious, it asks kids to play the game of the worst-case scenario. And it recommends books like Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and The Witches by Roald Dahl, where the protagonist has to go through incredible odds to arrive at the end. She fires up children’s imagination and takes them through the process of writing about emotions.
This is a great book to have at your side. It gives you a lot of insight into a child’s mind and their writing capabilities, and all it takes is for you to spot the different levels they’re at at different ages. If you’ve always wanted to start your child writing, this is the book to have.
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