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Homeschooling can be fun and very beneficial, but it can as well be the opposite, dull and a total waste of your time. You don’t want your children developing a negative attitude towards learning. When you opt for homeschooling, be sure that you have all it takes to make it a success.
“All it takes” isn’t just having the idea and implementing it. You need the learning material resources, creativity, patience, and thorough understanding of the subject matter among others. You have to device creative and effective ways of delivering content without losing the children’s attention. One such subject that requires your creativeness is teaching creative writing.
You need an ethical and methodological approach. Even as adults, many individuals dislike creative writing because of the experience they had as children. To avoid such a scenario, you’ll have to employ innovative teaching techniques. Here are seven tips that can guide you teach creative writing with much ease.
Take Advantage of Online Resources
There are numerous online learning tools that you can take advantage of, using them to improve the overall learning experience. Your primary goal when teaching original writing is to inspire your kids’ imagination, and ultimately make them fall in love with writing. These online platforms help ‘spice up’ learning.
Examples include:
- Fun writing games
- Editing and proofreading tools, although older students will benefit more from this. As their teacher, this is also a great resource for regularly improving your skills
- You can find interesting writing prompts online
There’s so much on the internet that can help you be a better teacher while at the same time help your children be successful students. However, the online world isn’t without its disadvantages. You have to protect your kids from the dangers that lurk there.
Let your child use the internet in moderation, keep them safe and take all the necessary security precautions.
Inspire the Children’s Journalistic Instincts
Creative writing doesn’t just require the aptitude to write in good grammar and language. It also needs some imagination, the ability to write content that arouses curiosity. Perfecting imaginative writing is something that happens over time even for the best of writers, and it starts from the time that we are young.
The moment your children know how to read and write, motivate them to start keeping a record of day to day happenings. You can have them regularly write a diary. Keeping such chronicles will inspire resourcefulness in writing. The fun part is, it doesn’t have to be much, a couple of lines or just a paragraph can suffice.
As The Teacher, Be Knowledgeable and Creative
You won’t be of use to the children if you’re not knowledgeable yourself – Read wide!
Writing is one of those disciplines that frequently change, new knowledge and techniques are adopted on a daily basis. Although not much really changes regarding the basics, new approaches are introduced. In a field like creative writing, rules of what can and can’t be done will change regularly.
To best teach how to write original material, you’ll have to be refreshing your skills recurrently.
There’s so much you can do, such as:
- Being a habitual reader
- Taking refresher courses
- Use online resources and platforms.
Those are to mention a few of what you the things that you can do to keep your writing skills on edge. It’s important because it helps you to demonstrate and deliver content better to your kids. As you learn, your level of creativity also improves which will impact positively on them.
Reading is a MUST!
Make them Read! Read! And Read even more!
Reading is a MUST, and there’s no way around it. You will have to inspire a reading culture in your children if they are to be good essayists. Reading doesn’t only benefit ingenuity but also basic writing skills like grammar, language, sentence structure, and flow.
As parents, there are times that we will restrict the kind of literature we want our children to read, and that might not be a very good idea. You have to let them explore literature on their own for them to grow. However, you’ll have to restrict the kind of material that they read, protecting them from harmful reading such as those with violence or promoting wrong social morals.
If they still don’t know how to read, you can be reading for them till they do. A good reading will do some good for your children’s creative writing skills. Across the globe, the best writers read a lot, proof that it will expand one’s writing proficiency.
Practice Makes Perfect
Regular exercises are a great way of building writing skills. Although, there’s a previous mention of how they can practice with writing a diary – Inspire the Children’s Journalistic Instincts, it’s essential that they frequently write articles.
Have a list of interesting creative essay prompts which you can be giving them from time to time. The regular practice will help expand the children’s creativity and writing skills. The more you do something, the better you become at it, and that’s the lesson they need to get. That way, even while on their own, they will still write content just to put their skills to practice.
Use Positive “Criticisms”
Of course, errors will be there, and you’ll have to be careful of how you handle the matter. The approach you use will either inspire or demoralize, and we definitely want the latter. I have quoted criticisms because what you’ll be doing isn’t really judging or criticizing but rather motivating.
Patience is one of the must-have virtues should you choose to homeschool your children. It can be frustrating at times, but you should be in a position to keep yourself composed. Be gentle, and let them be more open to learning. It’s easier to be creative in a relaxed atmosphere, even for adults. Positively correcting your child creates such an environment.
Have the Necessary Learning Material
You will have to invest in learning resources. Curriculum, books and other stationery are some of the materials that you’ll have to get. Utilize any tool or content that you find will have a positive impact on their creative writing. Plus, you also need guidance from experts, and that’s why a curriculum will be necessary.
Fun activities and games, in particular, have a way of bringing out creativeness. Games are an excellent way of learning for kids. They are also a great way of passing the time without actually wasting it.
Inspire the kids to bring out their inner creativity
Creative writing is a challenge for a majority of the adults, the reason being that they lack the passion or the skills. They probably had it but lost it along the way because of the harsh learning atmosphere. You have the opportunity to motivate your child to love creative writing and find it fun. Use all the resources at your disposal to learn more on homeschool writing. When you combine that knowledge with these 7 tips, you’ll be better at teaching creative writing in your homeschool.
Christina Battons is a web content expert from LA. Creative writer, she is able to connect various thoughts into a single theme. Christina loves to stay up to date on the latest content marketing trends, and her works have been published on www.edubirdies.org. Connect with Christina on Twitter.
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