How to support your child with writing at home?

As educators, developing children’s enjoyment of writing is a key priority.  Our drive is to deliver writing sessions through a cross-curricular model with a focus on novels which link in closely with the Curriculum units that the children are studying.  By studying class novels, it is important that our children are writing for a purpose.

For further information about the writing curriculum at St Chad’s, please click on this link.

Helping your child with writing at home

To consolidate the learning taking place at school, there are a number of different activities that you can complete at home with your child.

EYFS and KS1

• Play word building games, like Boggle, Guess Who and Scrabble, to help develop children’s use of descriptive vocabulary.
• Let your child write different shopping lists and use them when shopping.
• Can your child write a set of instructions for any craft or cooking activities that they complete at home.
• Let your child write their own christmas or birthday cards.
• Make up a story about one of your child’s favourite toys.
• Create different funny sentences together e.g. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
• Let your child see you as a model writer by writing different forms of narrative.  Make sure that you let your child see you making mistakes so that they know that editing plays an important part of the writing process.
• Make sure you talk about a lot of your experiences e.g. places you visit and things that you might see.  Can this provide you with shared writing opportunities with your child?
• Encourage your child to orally rehearse sentences before they write them.
• Try fun activities that strengthen your child’s hand e.g. cutting painting and squeezing playdough.
• Use magnetic letters to make small words and phrases.
• Cut up letters from magazines for your child to create different words.

KS2

• Help your child write a letter to their favourite author.
• Write postcards from holidays and record different events in a diary.
• Write information pages about about a hobby that they find interesting e.g. dinosaurs.
• Can your child practise their joined up cursive handwriting?
• Can your child further develop their understanding of how to effectively use a dictionary and thesaurus.
• When your child has finished a piece of written homework, make sure that they proof read their work through an editing process.
• Can your child complete a piece of writing to summarise what has been happening within the book that they are reading?
• Read the beginning of a story with your child, can they then create a piece of writing to predict what they think will happen for the story ending?
• Read a range of different stories with your child to expose them to different descriptive vocabulary, sentence structures and types of punctuation.

Follow this link to a range of different websites that can be used to support your child with their writing at home.