Essay writing for kids is an important skill essential for academic excellence and personality development. Children with good essay writing skills are able to develop expression and creativity through language and ideas.
But not all kids get the opportunity to practice and learn essay writing as an important task of their curriculum. This is because we often assume that children need to get done with essay writing within a particular time frame, but every child requires his or her own time to think and write.
Children should be given plenty of time to practice essay writing, which can happen perfectly at home under the guidance of the parents.
Tips to Teach Essay Writing for Kids
As a parent, you can help improve your child’s essay writing skills through regular practice at home. To help you, here we have some important tips for you to teach essay writing for kids:
Always Start with the Basic
Essay writing for kids requires the basic knowledge of grammar and sentence formation; without these basics, your child may end up getting confused with the extra knowledge of essay formats and structures. Therefore, before moving ahead, improving your child’s basic grammar and sentence formation is necessary.
It is really necessary to build excellent writing skills, and kids need to develop the knowledge of sentence formation as per their age or school grade. For this, you can boost their reading exercise; the more kids read, the more they get to know about sentences and increase their vocabulary.
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Teach about Creating an Outline of the Essay
Creating an outline of an essay can help your children to follow an uninterrupted mode of writing. When your child knows what to write and how to write it, it helps save them time and effort and provides them with a structure for a guided progression. Through a rough outline of an essay, kids are more active in generating ideas linked with a particular part of the outline.
For an outline, they can make a basic skeleton of what they have to include in an introduction, in the body (deciding how many paragraphs to write), and in the end, the conclusion.
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Give Space for Practice
For kids, learning is a process of mistakes and improvements. Instructions alone may not be enough for them, but regular practice can bring them closer to perfection. Make sure to give your kids plenty of familiar topics on a daily basis.
Be Patient, and Avoid Overwork
Ask them to create outlines and write essays for more related topics and their immediate environment. Instead of giving them your direct opinions, be gentle and appreciate their efforts. Give them your advice on how their essay can be reorganised and written in a better language. Try to keep a stable balance between practice and breaks. Make sure not to overwork your kids.
Essay Writing for Kids: Basics and Writing Formats
What is essay writing? It is a written piece that describes, argues, and analyses a subject or an idea. It is composed of three basic elements: introduction, body, and conclusion. Let’s see how these three components form an essay as a whole.
Considering essay writing for kids, suppose a child is asked to write an essay on the title, ‘Save Environment’; then, the essay writing formats for kids will be:
Introduction
The introduction should have two important constituents:
#a. A sentence that will clearly tell what the essay is about. Here, this sentence can be,
“Our environment is being affected rapidly by human activities; it is our duty to save the environment we live in.”
#b. A sentence that tells your point of view on the topic. It should be attractive enough for the audience.
“Environmental damage is causing global warming, floods, droughts, and other crises around the world.”
Body
The body of an essay follows the introduction and includes detailed information on the topic. It can be divided into three-four paragraphs, depending on the word limit. For the topic ‘save the environment’, the following can be included in the body:
Paragraph 1
What causes a threat to the environment? Mention the harmful human activities, like excessive industrialisation, deforestation, and growing pollution.
Paragraph 2
What are the effects on the environment?
Mention global warming, growing diseases, and scarcity of resources.
Paragraph 3
Why do we need to save the environment?
Elaborate how resources are depleting, which will cause scarcity for future generations; explain the effects of pollution on human health; mention how global warming is leading to disasters like earthquakes and melting of glaciers.
Paragraph 4
How can we save the environment?
Add activities like rainwater harvesting, use of public transport (less carbon production), abolition of plastic substances, use of environment-friendly daily objects, like wooden brush and comb, use of steel buckets and others.
Conclusion
The conclusion of an essay summarises the whole essay in two or three lines. Avoid mentioning any new point or idea in the conclusion. You can also rephrase the topic in an elaborated way. Let’s see how we can conclude the above essay.
Adopting eco-friendly activities and general awareness around the globe can make a huge impact on our degraded environment. It’s the need of the hour to stand together and save our environment.
How to Write a Good Essay?
In order to boost your child’s essay writing skills, you should teach the following tips:
#. Understand the requirement of the essay through the title.
#. Create a rough outline of the paragraphs you want to include.
#. Prepare your reference material through good research.
#. Follow the three basic components of an essay: the introduction, body, and conclusion.
#. After finishing, always proofread thoroughly. This will help them spot grammatical mistakes and poor organisation of paragraphs.
#. Make sure to add some real life-based examples.
#. Focus on the language and see if it is clear enough.
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Conclusion
Good essay writing skills come from practise; hence, the basics mentioned above of essay writing and plenty of practice at home can help your child become an excellent writer in the future. Don’t forget to stay patient with your children’s growth and keep following their progress. At The Real School Of Montessori, we mentor children with personalised training programmes, which aims at making children problem solvers and thinkers. For more information on our one-on-one mentoring programmes, visit The Real School Of Montessori today.
