Today, April 10, is Encourage a Young Writer Day. Take some time throughout the next week to celebrate and inspire your distance learning writer. Here are four fun ways to encourage your student to expand writing skills.
1. Before you write, read! Readers become better writers and writers become better readers. Encourage your student to strengthen both skills by frequently engaging in both activities. Challenge your student to see how many books he can read during the next month. Have him set a goal to read a specific number of pages before the deadline and provide a fun reward when he achieves the goal. Advise your student to branch out of his comfort zone and explore books in different genres.
2. Create a children's story. This activity can combine reading, writing, and art into one fun project. Start by studying children's literature with your student. After reading several stories, have your student write and illustrate his own children's book.
3. Poetry puzzle. Both you and your student should create a list of five fun words to be used in a poem. Then, trade lists and construct a poem using all five words from the other's list. When you finish writing, share your poems with each other.
4. Bind a book. Either bind a book with blank pages that student can fill, or bind a collection of your student's best writing as a memento of their year. Consider the age of your student and choose a book binding technique that will work best with the project you choose to complete. To view book binding directions, click on the link and choose "view printout."