Many times throughout your child’s educational career, he will be required to write on a topic that is not of his choosing. Add in the pressures of not knowing the prompt ahead of time, having to write within a specific time period and being graded on multiple aspects of the essay and you can end up with a very stressed out student.

However, writing is an essential tool for your child to master in order to be successful in school. Many states have a writing assessment as part of their annual standardized testing. Additionally, in order to score well on the SATs, your child will need to write an organized, sophisticated, relatively error-free essay in 25 minutes.

The biggest problem I hear in my practice with writing is that students do not know where to begin. Sometimes they just start putting their ideas on paper and end up with a disorganized, unfocused jumble of thoughts that are difficult for a reader to follow. Other students are minimalists, afraid to write anything for fear of making mistakes. I have found that the best tool to teach struggling writers is prewriting. Once a child has a structure in place, writing the essay is much easier.

The first step is brainstorming. When teaching your child to brainstorm, let him talk while you write down his ideas. Encourage him to give you as many thoughts as possible, both good and bad. When he seems to be running out of ideas, ask a lot of questions. If the child can explain, “Why?” or give you examples, he will have more material to include. Another suggestion is to ask the child to pretend he is teaching his subject to a class. He can imagine what questions the students would ask and what information would be pertinent to help them understand his topic.

Next, have the student group his ideas into categories. Each of these groupings can then become body paragraphs. Using a graphic organizer, such as a map, web or outline will help your student develop a visual “big picture” before writing. If drawing a chart is too difficult or annoying, then just group ideas by topic on a piece of unlined paper.

Sometimes children balk at being required to do what they might consider “an extra step” before writing. However, when a student takes the time to prepare a prewriting structure, he usually finds that his ideas flow much more freely, resulting in a well-organized, clearly focused essay and a much happier writer.