The Forgotten ‘R’: 3 Ways to Boost Your Child’s Writing Skills This Summer

Despite being an essential life skill, writing is often overlooked in school. At-home exercises like journaling can help your child develop it.

Writing letters is a fun and personal way for kids to improve their writing skills while also strengthening relationships. Biba Kayewich

Educational fads come and go, but the core of any elementary and secondary school curriculum remains the three R’s—reading, writing, and arithmetic. Of this trio, reading and math garner the greatest attention from the media and the public, particularly when some national test revealing student deficiencies in these subjects makes the headlines.

Writing, also known as composition, is the Cinderella in this family, the neglected stepsister who rarely attracts any interest whatsoever. Given that we live in the age of communication—texts, emails, online chats, and a constant river of work-related reports and memoranda—there’s an irony at play in this disregard for the written word. Poor communication, which includes both writing and speaking, costs our businesses up to $1.2 trillion per year. Think of those times when you’ve sent a text or an email that a friend misinterpreted, and you begin to see the problem.

So, it’s long past time to bring Cinderella out of the shadows. Here are three ways to add some writing exercises to your child’s summertime activities that are beneficial as well as fun.

Moving Fingers Move the Mind

A journal can do wonders for a young person’s writing.

Here’s how I once taught journaling to homeschooling students. They were required to make three entries per week in a marble composition notebook at home, writing a minimum of 15 minutes each time with either a pen or a pencil. I strongly suggested the pen because the writing will likely last longer, in case they wanted to share this project with their grandchildren down the road. They were free to write about any topic they wished, with the guarantee that their entries would not be judged on grammar or spelling. The idea was simply to bring their minds and fingers together and move that pen across the page.

Parents doing the same with their children need to decide from the beginning whether they’re going to read these journals. The advantage in doing so is to evaluate the skill levels of your young people and what they’re saying; the disadvantage is the inhibition a shared journal may produce. You might also consider making the journal topic-specific. You could, for instance, ask your children to keep gratitude journals throughout the summer, a tri-weekly log of the events they appreciate and why.

Here’s one trick that will inspire them and keep them on track. Schedule the time—evenings are probably best—and then journal right along with them. Seeing Mom and Dad scribbling away should inspire them to do the same.

Revive the Lost Art of Letter Writing

Did Aunt Penelope send a lovely necklace for a birthday? It’s time for a thank-you note. Is Grandma in an assisted-living home 500 miles away? It’s time for a summer campaign of weekly letters. Did your son’s best friend move with his family across the country? It’s time to mix some letters into those phone calls.

Letters and emails are excellent vehicles for practicing composition. For one, most children, particularly if they’re younger, appreciate someone spell-checking their correspondence. For another, kids like writing when it’s more personal than an essay. Finally, the feedback from this correspondence, particularly handwritten letters delivered by snail mail, is often over the top. Few of us receive a note in the mail anymore, so its arrival becomes an occasion, a gift your children can cherish for the price of a postage stamp.

Just as you do for the journals, set aside a bit of time once a week for a letter-writing session. Once again, if the kids are reluctant, join in and see if that encourages them.

Learn Through Imitation

If you’re looking for a more serious but still entertaining writing program for your children, introduce them to the ancient practice of imitation.

From the days of the Greeks and Romans to the present, young people have learned the arts of writing and rhetoric by studying and then copying out classic passages from literature or history, much like those young artists seen in museums carefully reproducing the works of great masters. In 19th-century America, young students commonly copied out passages in school to practice their handwriting, but doubtlessly also absorbed some of the elegance that we find in the literature and letters of that period.

In his YouTube video “How to Improve Your Writing with Copywork,” essayist and critic Benjamin McEvoy enthusiastically recommends this technique of learning by imitation.

Other composition teachers go a step further. In the Advanced Placement language and composition classes I once taught to homeschoolers, we used “The Writer’s Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing,” in which author Gregory L. Roper has students read and study a passage from a work of literature. The literature can be as varied as Cicero, St. Paul, or James Joyce. Students then compose their own passage while trying to recreate the style of the author. Roper, for example, gives students a paragraph-long description of escaped convict Abel Magwitch in “Great Expectations,” then asks them to write a description of someone while taking Dickens’s passage as their model.

Direct copying and stylistic imitation are tools available for adolescents, teenagers, and adults. In this sample passage, the opening paragraphs of “Little House on the Prairie,” we find prose that even adolescents can appreciate and imitate:

“A long time ago, when all of the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. They drove away and left it lonely and empty in the clearing among the big trees, and they never saw that little house again.

“They were going to the Indian country.

“Pa said there were too many people in the Big Woods now.” In all the above suggestions, the intention is to write. As Roper tells us: “I simply believe that the only method for learning writing is learning by doing, the same way one learns to play a violin, or hit a topspin forehand, or make a fine soufflé. Therefore, I ask students to become apprentice writers, standing beside an accomplished master just as an apprentice blacksmith or carpenter or electrician stands beside a professional, so the students learn the craft by watching, imitating, and doing themselves.”

There’s no mystery in learning to write competently. If they know the basics of grammar and syntax, read good books and articles, and employ the techniques I and others have described, your children will enter adulthood with the ability to write clearly and effectively.