By Pam Woodbury

As Peggy Kaye lays out in the introduction of her Games for Writing book, there are three major obstacles in writing: spelling, handwriting, and fear.  While worrying about proper spelling, many children will inevitably restrict what they write to what they can spell.  Instead, if children could be encouraged to spell "the best they can" or "how it sounds" they will probably be much more free to write stories of greater length and interest.  Eventually, little by little, the spelling will improve.  Handwriting is another factor that can hinder the flow of thought.  Like Andrew Pudewa from the Institute for Excellence in Writing contends, penmanship is an art and is better taught as such.  When writing, as long as the work is legible, it is more important that the thoughts be transcribed onto paper than that the letters be beautifully formed.  To overcome the last major obstacle, fear, the student must be encouraged to write, write, and write some more.  The length, style or content of what is written doesn't really matter.  The more children write, the less fear they will have of writing, and in time, with assistance and patience, their writing will get better and better.

For children of all ages, writing is best taught by modeling.  In the early years, children can learn to write well using the "natural method" described in Ruth Beechick's A Strong Start in Language, part of her three-book set called The Three R's.  With this method, children learn to write by copying other sources of writing.  Andrew Pudewa has a very similar approach to that of Ruth Beechick only he adds to it a method for taking notes from the original source work and teaches reproduction from the notes along with a check list of grammatical "dress-ups" and sentence openers that the student must include in their version of the "copied" work. 

When our oldest were younger, my friend Fran and I decided we would form a "writers' club" where we would twice monthly provide the students with a topic to write about, some general advice, and a well-written model to follow.  In this case, we weren't expecting them to rewrite our work; rather we were assisting them in their own writing by supplying an example that they could try to emulate.  Through this approach we were able to introduce our young writers to a large variety of basic and advanced writing styles.  James Stobaugh, from For Such a Time as This Ministries, uses just about the same approach in his Skills for Rhetoric course.  For each new writing skill introduced, he gives not only important information regarding how to produce the desired result, he also presents an example that the student can reference.

Whether young or old, students need both frequent opportunities to write as well as quality models to follow.