Helping Your Child Become a Writer - Simple Strategies for the Whole Family

Oct 15, 2026

Helping Your Child Become a Writer explains how explicit writing instruction can improve children’s speaking, reading comprehension, knowledge building, and thinking. It addresses common challenges such as writing that mirrors speech and providing responses that are too brief or rambling. Real family examples show how sentence stems using because/but/so help children elaborate verbally and in writing, then extend to complex sentences and sentence expansion by adding who/what/when/where/why/how details.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryExam

FormatPDF

Pages3

Reading Time8 min

AccessFree to download

Helping Your Child Become a Writer

Simple Strategies for the Whole Family

Writing Complex Sentences

Expanding Sentences

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JESSIE LIN Helping Your Child Become a Writer Simple Strategies for the Whole Family By Judith C. Hochman, Toni-Ann Vroom, and Dina Zoleo W riting has many benefits. It can improve children’s speaking, boost their reading comprehension, build their knowledge, and elevate their thinking. But one reason it’s hard to learn is that without explicit writ- ing instruction, children often write the way they speak. From elementary through high school, many children answer questions with little elaboration. Others tend to ramble on, giving unnecessary information in a disorganized fashion. It’s not unusual to see the same tendencies in their writing. With the strategies shared in this article, your child will be on their way to becoming a clear thinker and coherent communicator—not justin school but for the rest oftheir life. We can see some of this progress with Michael. Ms. Worth, mother of 10-year-old Michael, looked forward to hearing about his day at school. However, when asked, Michael always gave the same answer: “Good.” After reading about the benefits of explicit writing instruction,1 Ms. Worth decided to try an approach that seemed to Judith C. Hochman, former head of The Windward School in White Plains, New York, is thefounder of The Writing Revolution anda coauthor (with Natalie Wexler) of The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades. Toni-Ann Vroom and Dina Zoleo are co-chief executive officers and founding members of The Writing Revolution. make sense to her: sentence stems. But she didn’t ask Michael to write; she just added them to their conversation. When Michael provided his usual response,“Good,” she asked him to turn the following sentence stems into complete sentences: School was good because . School was good, but . School was good, so . Ms. Worth learned that Michael had a good day because his class visited the aquarium. Michael’s day was good, but he had to write about the field trip. Finally, Michael shared“School was good today, so I hope tomorrow is, too.” Michael was able to provide much more information to his mother when she gave him an approach that incorporated the conjunctions because, but, and so than if she had just asked her usual question,“How was your day?” Although the because/but/so strategy was developed to help students with their writing, there are great benefits to using itorally, too—especially at home. It gives children a structure to extend and elaborate their verbal responses. And, when children offer their families even a few more details, great conversations are often sparked. Since the sentence stems worked well, Ms. Worth also started using them to extend Michael’s written responses when she helped him with his homework. She found that this strategy had a great impact when applied to the content he was studying. 28 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | FALL 2023 For example, when Michael was learning about theAmerican Revolution in school, he read about the causes of the conflict. Rather than asking“Why did many colonists want to breakaway from Great Britain?,” Ms. Worth tried checking his understanding by giving him the following sentence stems: Prompting children with because, but, and so is a simple yet powerful strategy. It requires children to think more analytically, while also teaching them how to extend their written responses. Writing Complex Sentences Like so many children, Michael often writes the way he speaks—and the quality of his writing may suffer as a result. Written language generally requires more precision than spoken language because the reader of atext cannot ask for clarification the way a listener can (i.e., when you’re reading a book, you can’t ask the author what a confusing sentence means). In addition, the sentence structure of written language is more complex than the language we generally use in conversation. Writers often use multiple clauses and subordina

FAQs

Why is explicit writing instruction important for children?

It helps children learn to write with precision instead of simply writing the way they speak, which can limit clarity. It also strengthens reading comprehension and thinking through more structured language.

How do because/but/so sentence stems support better writing and conversation?

They give children a structure to extend and elaborate answers by prompting cause (because), contrast (but), and result (so). This encourages more detailed verbal responses and clearer written elaboration.

What are complex sentences, and how can children practice using them?

Complex sentences use multiple clauses and subordinating conjunctions such as although, since, before, after, and if. A practical approach is providing the beginning of a sentence and having the child supply the rest based on their assigned reading.

Oct 15, 2026

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