Writer's Block

Does your child moan and groan when asked to compose sentences or invent stories? You're not alone.

Writing homework doesn't have to mean frustration and fighting.

Carol Snow, a mother of two from Fullerton, California, is a writer by trade. So she was unprepared for the resistance she faced from her second-grade daughter, Lucy, over writing. When Lucy brought home writing assignments from school, "It was torture," recalls Snow. "Lucy sat at the table, staring at a blank piece of paper, paralyzed. I tried to teach her how to brainstorm, I tried the whole who-what-why-when-how thing. Within five minutes, she was in tears."

Snow — and Lucy — are far from alone in their frustration. Writing is, of course, a critical skill for children to learn and is intricately tied to reading. It is a central part of the elementary school curriculum — not just in language arts but in social studies, science, and even math. And yet there are many children who, like Lucy, simply don't take to writing. Far from being a natural and enjoyable process for these kids, writing feels overwhelming, tortuous, downright painful.

What's a Parent to Do?
It's important to address your child's writing aversion early, says Betsy Rogers, a first- and second-grade teacher in Birmingham, Alabama, who was the National Teacher of the Year in 2003. "As children get older, they only get more intimidated by writing," she says. "You need to start at a young age, creating a strong connection in the minds of your kids between reading and writing."

As a parent, you may be at a loss as to how to help your child get out of the writing rut. In her book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, essayist Anne Lamott tells a story about her older brother who, at age 10, had to write a report about birds for school. She describes her brother, "surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead." Lamott's father approached him, put an arm around his shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

This "bird by bird" philosophy is shared by many teachers and writing experts as a useful tool for helping reluctant writers. "One of the biggest problems for children is the terror of the blank page," says Amy MacDonald, author of more than a dozen children's books, including Little Beaver and the Echo and Rachel Fister's Blister. "Taking the first step of a journey is always the hardest."

That first step can simply mean breaking down a seemingly monumental task into smaller, more manageable parts. "By giving kids a few clear options, you're helping to narrow their sense of too many choices," says Rogers.

Writing Prompts and Other Upsetting Assignments
A widely used tool in many school systems around the country is the writing prompt, also called a story starter. The idea is to jumpstart the writing process by providing a beginning point, just as MacDonald and Rogers suggest. Some examples might be "Last weekend I..." or "My summer vacation was..."

Yet the writing prompt assignment still strikes fear in the hearts of many struggling writers. The problem with many of the prompts, say teachers and parents, is that they are often vague and can feel too big to kids. "Writing prompts can be useful tools when they are very specific," says Craig Lautenschleger, a fourth grade teacher at New Albany Elementary in New Albany, Ohio. "But when they're too general, kids can get overwhelmed trying to figure out what the teacher wants."

MacDonald encourages these kids to visualize an inverse pyramid. If a writing prompt begins generally, children can narrow it down with specifics, thereby making it seem smaller and less daunting. Take, for example, the prompt, "Write about something unusual that happened to you."

Ask your child: Do you want to write about something funny that happened? Something embarrassing? Scary?
Then ask where this funny thing took place. Was it at school? At home? On the playground?
Next, you might ask who else was there, if anyone. Friends? A teacher? A pet?

In this way, your children can progressively narrow the pyramid to a more manageable size.

Another common writing assignment is having kids use vocabulary words in sentences, which in many families (including mine) is also known as the Boring and Annoying Exercise. To make it more fun for your kids, says Lautenschleger, be creative: Challenge your kids to use more than one word in a sentence, or try to create a story incorporating all the vocabulary words. "If kids are in charge of how the sentences are constructed, it becomes more of a meaningful writing piece," he says.

Top Ten Rules for Reluctant Writers
The expectations for young writers vary, of course, by grade, as do the types of resistance teachers and parents encounter. Third-graders are expected to edit their own writing for punctuation, grammar, and spelling errors with increasing accuracy. Kids should initiate ideas for writing, express themselves clearly, develop strategies for organizing their writing and use detail and descriptive language. A commonly used tool in third grade is brainstorming or "webbing": using a spiderweb diagram to graph the central idea of a story, moving outward on the web to add specifics. Kids at this age can feel intimidated by longer writing assignments and may seek comfort in knowing how many sentences or paragraphs are expected of them.

Still, most teachers and children's writing experts would agree on a set of principles parents can use to turn reluctant writers into, if not future Pulitzer Prize winners, at least kids who don't dread putting pencil to paper.

Read aloud to your child every day.
Talk to him about writing in everyday life, by writing notes or shopping lists and asking him to do the same, for example. This will help strengthen the connection between reading and writing.
Ask her to draw a picture, or find one in a magazine or art book, that expresses her thoughts. Then have her write about the picture.
Avoid perfect-speller paralysis. It's the process of writing that's important, most teachers will agree, and fear of misspelling should never get in the way. Keep in mind that by fourth or fifth grade, teachers will start to expect proper spelling.
Help him choose writing topics that hold inherent interest for him.
Try having her write on the computer once in a while if handwriting is a struggle.
Encourage your child to think through how his story will end in order to avoid getting stuck mid-story. Once he knows the beginning and the end, "the middle will write itself," says MacDonald.
Try not to influence her ideas, directing her toward something you "know" will work — tempting as it may be. "Creativity and passion flow best when kids feel ownership over their writing," says Lautenschleger.
If he is suffering from writer's block, let him walk away for a while and revisit the writing later.
Let her fail, says MacDonald. "Kids learn more by seeing where they went wrong than writing it perfectly the first time."

Carol Snow eventually learned to bite her tongue when reviewing Lucy's prose. "Her stories were always too short and disorganized, but I finally realized that by trying to teach her to write properly, I was making her hate and fear the writing process." So although she may not follow in mom's professional footsteps, Lucy will make her own way as a writer, in 3rd grade and beyond.

	Preschool	Sample
	Elementary School	Sample