Everybody Writes Day: How does Writing Help your Child?

This article covers:

• What is Everybody Writes Day
• How to Help your Child Write

People have used writing as a medium to express what they have bubbling in their minds. A means of being creative and escaping into a world where they could spill what they wanted to say.

With the invention of social media and blogging websites, writing has taken a new form.

To celebrate our passion for writing in the UK, we have a whole day dedicated to writing named Everybody Writes Day.

Everybody Writes Day

Everybody Writes Day cultivates and encourages creative writing. Children in primary and secondary schools are given exciting stimuli for writing to encourage innovative and creative writing.  It enables children to express their creativity and ideas in words and opening other paths of communication. This connects them with a wider audience, teaching them how to use words as a powerful tool of communication and encourages children to exercise their cognitive senses.

Learning how to put their ideas on paper also builds critical thinking skills, as some words will better describe what they are aiming to relay than others. Using verbal imagery to explain a physical location or writing about someone’s emotions, this gets them to really think and try to connect ideas.

Writing is truly a magical medium – useful anywhere in the world. Take the opportunity to teach your child the importance of writing. Make it fun so they can explore their creativity and gain a better idea of how words can be used to describe what we see, feel, or describe something imagined.

How to Help Your Child Write

You can encourage their creative thinking processes by staging an event they could write about. For example, you can stage a fallen meteor that has brought a strange living creature to Earth.

Assign children roles of journalists and storytellers to explain the strange occurrence. This would get their mind running, coming up with new ways to report something they haven’t seen before.

It will not only show their capability of creative writing but also teach them how to write stories for the newspaper. You can take the opportunity to teach them about context and tone.

For more factual base writing skills, you can ask your child to come up with explanations of how the meteor came to be and how it came to the planet.

For older children, ask them to pick one of their favourite books and re-imagine the story. They can shift genres, characters, the setting, etc. This will surely come up with very interesting new takes on popular books.

The goal here is to personalise something with your writing skills, allowing allow them to articulate what they found missing in the story or put a face to what they imagine the story to be.

It will teach them innovation, creativity, and technical writing skills at the same time.