All About English Composition

[weatherbee]

How to improve our kids’ essay writing? My kids read a lot but can’t write well.

[weatherbee]

How to improve our kids’ essay writing? My kids read a lot but can’t write well.

[williamholt]

An essay can have many purposes, but the basic structure is the same no matter what. You may be writing an essay to argue for a particular point of view or to explain the steps necessary to complete a task.


Either way, your essay will have the same basic format.

If you follow a few simple steps, you will find that the essay almost writes itself. You will be responsible only for supplying ideas, which are the important part of the essay anyway.
Perhaps one of the most difficult tasks any writer has is choosing a http://essayboards.com to write about. Whether you are writing a personal essay or a scientific report, it’s important to start by reading the assignment carefully. Once you know what the instructor is looking for, you can begin to play with various topic ideas.

[ammonite]

I suggest reading short stories from Enid Blyton. The idea of introduction, development and ending is wrapped up within a few pages, allowing the child to have a better idea of what is doable within the short time frame.


You can select adventure stories, add in some accident scenarios from newspaper, and get them into the habit of checking their grammar at the end of it. This I think, will be the minimum a kid should know. The school will do idioms with them, but the child will also benefit from knowing more connectives, and ways of adding colors and tension to his writing. I do not sit down to do writing with my child, but every now and then, I will discuss writing methods with him for 10 min and I find that he will experiment with them.

He is not a great scorer because of spelling errors, but his stories flow and he enjoys writing them very much in both languages. He is never out of ideas, something which his teachers have commented on as well. He does read a lot and widely. I do not encourage Geronimo Stilton though he does have a few of those. It is full of new vocabulary but the sentences do not flow well and someone who is not well versed in English idioms will learn all the wrong things - the mousified version.

[beanbear]

I struggled and still strugglr with understanding my kids’ issues with writing. After some painful reflections, i came to some insights & observations.

1. Reading well and reading alot does not always translate into writing well. My kids r surrounded by books in e house and i read to them, & with them since they were babies.
2. Being able to write a creative story does not necessarily ttanslate into a high-scoring compo by the school exam standards.
3. What is good enogh? Ive asked for markings rubrics for compo from school.but they told me its confidential. All i get is content 20 marks, grammar 20 marks. ( upper pri). No other guidelines werr given to me except v vague things like more creative phrases, varied sentences.

So wat i realise i had to do to help my child was to first let him understand its great to read for pleasure & reading and writing to score for exams. Literally, i figured out rubrics by examining different writing guidebooks & attending parent workshops & interviewing Ex-school English teachers who were willing to reveal to me more specifically what is good enough writing. In terms of grades, i finally realize what was needed to take DS from 24 out of 40 to a 31or 32 out of 40. No thanks to the school.

[ammonite]

Haha, definitely not creative at all. My theory is that the majority of English teachers at primary school level did not do literature or major in English at the tertiary level. I dare say few of them know the classics or even read much for leisure. How to ‘teach’ or mark creative writing?


A really important and useful skill that they should teach is summarizing. But instead you have ‘creative writing’ of traumatic death of siblings, drowning, bloody accidents etc where kids try to outdo one another with hyperbolic descriptions. I feel really sorry for the children in class who did actually have to live through a traumatic accident or death in the family.

[Minstral]

My P4 and P6 kids write poorly too and asking them to read more and practise more doesn’t help. They simply dislike it! I’m thinking of sending my kids to a reading programme so that they will at least learn to like reading and read better.

[verykiasumummy]

Dear Parents here,


dd came home with her eng compo today and i’m a little fed up with the comments written by the teacher…

"read more books!"

does the teacher mean that there are no other comments other than the super unconstructive "read more books"???

can any parents out there share what kind of comments that ur dc gets from their teacher and how you improve their writing skills from there???

[verykiasumummy]

previous comments from my ds1 last yr teacher was alot better… i get comments like :


- missing development details between mid of 2nd paragraph to start of 3rd paragraph… addn story development is recommended to add interest to the story.

- use of descriptive phrases can be improved, try other phrases rather stick to the same old ones.

- u did not mention how the driver was saved by the writer, elaborate in a short paragraph for corrections.


i like these kind of comments where it specifies how students can improve… i really dun understand why the teacher couldnt write more to specify my dd’s weakness now.

[cherrygal]

Read more books = improve sentence structure; improve story idea etc


Besides reading more storybooks for creative ideas, get your dd to read model compositions written by kids her age. These are more structured and will let her know how to score at compo tests.

My ds’ teacher does not even write comments on the compositions.