Tips to improve writing and vocabulary

[wiziliz]

Any tips on how I can improve my 11 year old daughters writing and vocabulary? Any books, etc .

Writing: give her time to day dream. Give her opportunities (without pushing) to talk about/ draw/ make animations of what she imagines. Encourage her to watch lots of good stories (films, TV shows, whatever) and to read lots of gripping books. Give her notebooks, access to wordpad, whatever. Give positive but also constructive feedback when asked for it.

Vocabulary: when she asks you what a word means, tell her, or look it up together. That's it, isn't it? That's how my children's vocabulary expands. There is a whole genre of cartoons really aimed at adults but that children can get a lot out of (like Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, that sort of thing). We have a huge number of "what does this word mean?" conversations coming out of those kinds of books.

NB my children are home educated, so they do have time, lack of comparison with peers, and adults around who can be responsive pretty instantly (what with not being responsible for 30 children at once), so it's quite easy for these things to develop organically. I have no idea how one would be best to support development of those skills with a child who was spending hours of time and expending huge mental energy in school every day.

Thank you ommmward.

By "writing", do you mean the physical act of writing with pen or pencil, or the ability to construct good content?

For vocabulary, one of the best things you can do is read aloud to your child as much as possible, and use audiobooks. In his excellent book "The Read-Aloud Handbook" (which is far better than you might imagine from its uninspired title!), Jim Trelease cites a whole host of benefits for reading aloud to children right into their teens. He observes that until children are completely fluent readers, they can understand much more advanced books when listening than when reading for themselves. Typically the books children hear are more interesting, their plots are more complex, sentence structure and grammar are more varied and advanced, and vocabulary is far more extensive.