13 Tips for Young Writers / Day Four: Write It All Down

By Dr. K. Mark Hilliard

Day 4: Write It All Down

Encourage your child to take time to compose his or her thoughts and words, into written notes, partial sentences, complete sentences, paragraphs, and finally stories. Just write down those thoughts as you think of them. Then your child can go back to develop them into phrases, sentences, paragraphs, a story. Later young writers can put appropriate sentences together, changing words, adding information, as needed.

It takes some time to develop a story from those first notes into a finished story. That’s why the journal is so helpful. Tell your young writer not to cross things out with more than one fine line, so he or she can still read those ideas later. Keep all those notes and ideas. They may be helpful later.

Action Item

Have your child write down random thoughts today. You can start him or her off by using one of these prompts if you want:

1) Describe a room in our house.

2) Describe a room in your dream house.

3) Write down a place you want to visit and why.

4) Write down what you would do on a dream vacation.

5) Write down a memory, and it’s okay if you want to add in some things that didn’t really happen!

6) Think of the story you want to write or are working on. Write down character names and think about what they look like and enjoy doing.