Some children enjoy spending hours on end writing paragraphs and stories, but others absolutely dread it.‎ They may have great ideas but struggle to express them on paper. Yet as students move through school, the writing demands will only continue to increase. Help make writing fun for your child with the ideas detailed below.

Play games!
Playing word games with your child can help improve spelling, vocabulary, and overall writing skills. Try playing the popular game Scrabble, where players use letters on tiles to form words that build on each other.‎ Hangman is another fun game, where one player thinks of a word and writes a series of blank spaces on a sheet of paper, each representing a letter. The other player must guess the letters one at a time until they come up with the word (or get “hanged”). You can play story games with your child, where you provide your child with a story that contains blanks for words that they must fill in or play a dice game like “Roll a Story” where players roll a series of dice that each contain a picture and uses their imagination to write a creative story.

Psst..check out these 13 Fun Fidget Toys to Help Kids Focus- and even parents will love!

Journaling
Encourage your child to maintain a journal and write in it daily or almost daily, and you will likely see a drastic improvement in her writing skills. Start by taking your child to a store and letting her pick out a journal with cool, colorful patterns that appeal to her.‎ Then try to do something interesting each day – whether it’s taking a trip to the zoo or a park, or simply discussing a current events topic or trying a new food for dinner. Then encourage your child to write about that topic in her journal. Tell her not to worry about perfect spelling or organization; the idea is just to write freely. Later you can teach her to go back and self-check her work with an acronym like COPS, which stands for Capitalization, Organization, Punctuation, and Spelling, where she writes a check box next to each letter in COPS (written vertically) and checks for each element in the acronym, one by one. For starters, though, just have her focus on writing freely and creatively.

Create a Writing Jar
Create a fun “writing jar” filled with story prompts. To do so, look through newspapers and magazines with your child and cut out interesting pictures of animals, celebrities, or beautiful vacation spots.‎ You can also write down phrases on small cards, like “If I were an animal, I’d be…” or “My favorite dessert is…” and put those cards in the jar. Then have your child close his eyes, pick a card from the jar, and use it as a story prompt to create a writing piece. You may want to have him self-check his work, just like with the journal entries, using COPS as detailed above.

Write Letters
Most of us prefer to text or email friends and relatives since it seems so much faster and more efficient. Yet creating handwritten letters can improve writing skills, and it’s exciting for the recipient to receive an actual letter in the mail – a real novelty these days. Purchase colored pens or pencils, stamps, and stickers for your child, and have her write a letter to a cousin, grandparent, aunt, uncle, friend, or even pen pal, then decorate it with lots of colors, pictures, and stickers. Make it a fun, colorful activity and she will have lots of fun doing it – plus the recipient will be thrilled to receive it!

Try an App!
We all know that kids love playing on tablets or computers, so try integrating writing apps‎ and games to help improve writing skills. The app Writing Challenge for Kids includes a variety of prompts that kids can choose from to write a creative story. “Book creator” is a tool that helps students write their own books using different templates and designs. “Edublogs” is a great website that helps your child get into blogging! Kids can create their own blog on a topic that interests them and can share it with others. “Net Rover” is another website that contains lots of fun writing games for kids to play.

Writing is a wonderful opportunity for expression and a key skill that is critical for school success. Help your child improve her writing skills while having fun with these tips, and she will be well on her way to school success!

The post Improve Your Child’s Writing Skills With Helpful (and Fun) Activities appeared first on EBL Coaching.

Summer is a time for relaxing in the pool, playing at the beach, and catching up on rest. Yet summer is also a large stretch of time without continuous academic instruction. While some children are able to maintain their end-of-school-year academic levels, many lose valuable skills over the summer. Help your child prevent summer brain drain with the ideas detailed below:

1. Reading. One of the most important ways to prevent academic regression is to make sure your child continues reading. At the start of the summer, take a trip to your local library or book store and have your child choose a set of books to read. Try coming up with a theme, like animals, insects, summertime, etc., and have him select books on that theme. For a summertime theme, for instance, he can select a series of books at his level (along with some more complex ones that you can read to him) on fishing, sea shells, camp, vacations, etc.

2. Educational trips. While beaches and amusement parks offer well-earned play time and relaxation, build in some educational trips to stimulate your child academically. Plan day trips to science museums, childrens’ museums, historical sites, and the like. Before you embark on your adventure, have your child perform a mini research project. Explore the website with her to see which exhibits will be showing the day you attend and study topics you might see (birds and reptiles, for instance, at a history museum). You can even take a virtual tour online to build up excitement. Have your child write down a list of items she may see and create a “treasure hunt.” If she finds all of the items while exploring the museum, perhaps she can pick out a memorable item at the gift shop at the end of the visit.

3. Technology. Kids often use iPads and computers for mindless gaming and relaxation. Yet there are many apps and websites that are great for reinforcing learning over the summer. iWrite Words is a useful early childhood app for developing handwriting and fine motor skills. With the Book Creator app, elementary and middle school students can create shareable e-books with words and images. Learn Your Table is a great website for practicing multiplication facts. Short Vowel Word study is also a useful app for reinforcing basic word decoding, and Grammaropolis is an interactive website for practicing grammar.

4. Outdoor learning. Turn outdoor time into learning time! To reinforce math, writing, and critical thinking skills, try growing a vegetable garden with your child. Choose the vegetables you plan to grow, then have your child draw a diagram of the garden layout and make a list of the seeds you need to purchase. Once the vegetables are planted, have her monitor and chart heir growth. She can count  the number of ‎veggies produced and predict which ones might produce the greatest outcome. You can even have her write a report detailing the process and results.

5. Journaling. Journaling is a great way to reinforce writing skills over the summer. Have your child keep a daily journal during the summer months, detailing any trips, events, or activities that took place – or even just thoughts or feelings from that day. You can even give him some writing prompts to help him get started, such as “Summer is my favorite time of year because…,” “My favorite summer sport is…,” or “This summer I am most excited about…” Let the ideas flow!

Your child certainly deserves some rest and mindless play over the summer. Yet several months without academic work can lead to academic regression and a real case of brain drain. Try these activities with your child to keep up learning and take advantage of summer in a fun, productive way.

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As final exams approach, help the kids manage stress with these tricks from a local education expert: The night before an exam, many students feel “sick”–their head is aching, their stomach hurts, their back is sore. Others feel angry, or possibly even depressed. Some are irritable and others lose focus. While these symptoms might seem like ones that need medical attention, they may just be implications of test anxiety–especially if a big exam is looming. Try some of the strategies below to reduce your child’s anxiety and help her feel relaxed, prepared, and positive come test day.

‎1) Deep breathing exercises: When we feel anxious, our breathing often moves from deep abdominal breathing to shallow chest breathing. Help your child relax and breathe deeply to reduce anxiety before an exam with the following exercise:

Have your child lay down or sit in a comfortable spot with his eyes closed. Tell him to focus on his breathing, and rest his hands on his stomach to feel his breath move up and down. Have your child count backwards from 10 (or another number of your choosing) in the following manner: he inhales deeply while saying the number “ten.” He then exhales while saying out loud “relax.” Then he inhales again deeply and says “nine,” and exhales while saying “relax.” He continues to follow this pattern until he reaches zero. As he performs this exercise, his breathing should move from shallow chest breathing to deeper abdominal breathing, helping him to relax and reduce his anxiety before an exam.

2) Journaling:  Encourage your child write in a journal about her test worries. On the morning of the exam, have her sit in a quiet room free of distractions and write about her worries and concerns for 10 minutes. She can even decorate her journal with colors or stickers to make it feel comforting and familiar. A University of Chicago Study found that this type of journaling can help students reduce their anxiety and improve their overall performance on exams.

3) Memory strategies: Remind your child to use memory strategies when preparing for exams, including acronyms, checklists, and other mnemonics. For example, he can also use an acronym such as PEMDAS (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally) to remember the sequence in solving math equations: Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. Likewise, when learning the planets, your child can create a silly sentence such as “My very eager mom jumped straight up near Paris!” to represent Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. As soon as he is given his test, he should write down the acronyms‎ and/or other mnemonics that he memorized.

4) Rewards: Give your child a reward to look forward to once the exam is over, whether it’s a movie, dinner out at her favorite restaurant, an ice cream date, or a similar treat. Providing your child with something exciting to look forward to can help her stay calm and positive.

5) During the exam, encourage your child to use test-taking strategies. For instance, she should answer the easiest questions first and determine an allotted amount of time to spend on each question. For multiple choice questions, she should read the question in its entirety before looking at the answer choices, try to answer the question in her mind before looking at the choices, and cross out answers she knows are incorrect. For essay exams, she should map out a schedule, carefully look at the directive words when reading the question, and create an outline before beginning to write.

Taking tests–whether standardized or in-class–can be daunting for many students. By teaching your child strategies and encouraging him to use these strategies on a regular basis, he will learn to relax, stay confident, and improve his overall performance on exams.

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The night before an exam can bring immense anxiety to children. They might complain of a stomach ache, head ache, back ache, or just about any other body pain. They may feel tired, angry, or irritable. In reality, they could just be experiencing test taking anxiety. Try the strategies below to help ease this anxiety and help your child feel comfortable and confident come test day.

The post 5 Tips for Reducing Test-Taking Anxiety appeared first on EBL Coaching.