Your Child's Written Work: To Edit or Not To Edit?

After your child finishes a writing assignment for school, do you immediately proofread and edit it “with” them?  As a caring parent it's normal to want to help your child with their homework. However, giving him the opportunity to find and fix his own mistakes is important. Throughout their school careers students are required to edit their work without assistance. Therefore it is crucial that they have experience doing so. 

One strategy that I recommend is having the child read their piece out loud. Very often they’ll hear their mistake and be able to correct it. If they don’t notice, perhaps a gentle, “Does that sound right?” after you read it aloud to them, might help.

Sometimes though, when we read our own work, our brain fills in what we intended to write. You can read what your child has written out loud to them. If they have typed their assignment on the computer, you can have the computer read it to them. ReadPlease is a computer program that reads text aloud. CLICK HERE for free downloadable software.

A critical tool for every household is a dictionary. A good dictionary will include synonyms antonyms which can help increase your child’s word usage. Why use mundane words like said, sad, walk, when retorted, depressed, ambled, would be so much more interesting! The verbs are the power of our language, not the flowery adjectives. 

One of the reasons children balk at writing is because handwriting is so cumbersome. I recommend teaching touch typing to children. There are many free typing tutor software programs available that have a game format, making it fun for the children to learn and practice. CLICK HERE for a link to an article comparing the different programs.

The more children write, the better they get. Encourage your child to write as much as possible. Model writing whenever you can. The more they see you writing, the more they’ll want to write. And most importantly: writing should be a joy and never used as a punishment.