The bell rings and suddenly school’s out for summer. The last thing you want as a parent is for your child to lose all the critical skills they’ve learned over the past academic year. You may be asking yourself, what are some simple ways to keep my student’s writing skills strong this summer?
There are 3 easy things you can do to keep your middle or high school student’s writing skills sharp.
See your teenager’s confidence and growth explode this summer in one of our writing sessions.
1. Prompt Them With Writing Goals
The easiest way to sharpen those writing skills is to prompt your student. No, it doesn’t need to be a full-fledged essay response. But it does require them to pick up a pen or pencil to write a response. Try to have them:
- Brainstorm at least 10 things they want to do this summer (like a bucket list)
- Then ask them to categorize their answers into groups (i.e. outdoor activities, travel, food, etc)
Not only is this a fantastic way to see what they are interested in and how to make their summer one to remember, but you’ll also start to see how they think. Use this type of prompt to spur conversation. They won’t even realize that this was a writing activity!
2. Dive Deeper With Simple Sentence Strategies
The next strategy to deploy is to have your child use at least two WH (what, when, where, what kind, which, how, and why) prompts to elaborate on their sentences. It could look like this:
- Suzy walked her dog. ➡️ Yesterday, Suzy walked her dog to the park because the dog needed exercise.
- Jimmy went to the movies. ➡️ Jimmy went to the movies with his friends to watch Spiderman.
The key here is to get them to start thinking about the importance of details and how to describe those details in an order that naturally makes sense.
3. Gain Writing Confidence In A Summer Writing Camp
While the examples we gave throughout this article are very elementary, you can adjust the strategies to meet your teenager where they’re at academically. Did your child say they want to go to camp or prepare better for the upcoming year on their summer bucket list?
The Write Turn has summer writing camps for middle and high school students where they’ll learn strategies for planning, writing, and most importantly revising across all genres of writing.
Explore every genre (narrative, expository, persuasive, literary argumentation) in our evidence-based writing program that provides 20 hours of specialized and explicit instruction.
Soon, they’ll be masters at:
- Planning, writing, and revising
- Brainstorming and organizing ideas
- Elaborating on those ideas
- Sentence-combining and writing grammatically correct sentences
- Annotating text for literary analyses
- Using more descriptive vocabulary
- Using basic and more advanced punctuation
This is the perfect program to set your student up for the upcoming academic year. Claim your seat today before your preferred writing session fills up.
Your Child’s Writing Skills Are Ready To Be Sharpened
Don’t let the summer pass you by until it’s crunch time to get ready for school! Keep the learning alive by signing up for a summer writing session.