Emphasize critical thinking. During this time in their lives, children should be developing the skills necessary to prepare them for higher learning. This will ensure that they have the most opportunities possible. An absolutely necessary skill for higher education, as well as a vital life skill, is critical thinking. Encourage your students to really think about the things they are reading and writing. This will prepare them to do everything from analyze news stories to participating fully in the political process.

• Have your students ask questions about what they are reading. Who wrote this book? Why did they write it? Who did they write it for? What impact did the environment around them have on the text? There are many questions like these which can serve to illuminate information hidden within the things they read.
• Have your students ask questions about their own writing. Why did I choose this voice? Why do I have the opinion I've expressed? Why is this something I care about? What would I rather be writing? These kinds of questions can lead your students to learn a lot about themselves but it will also help them make more conscious decisions about the things they write.

• For elementary age children, literacy skills will place a stronger emphasis on things like spelling, whereas literacy education for pre-teens will spend more time with grammar.

Introduce the types of writing. There are many different types of writing which your students will need to learn about. Knowing how to recognize and reproduce different styles for different contexts will be very important later on in life.

• Teach your students to recognize narrative writing. This is writing which conveys a story and is the form most often read for pleasure. It is commonly used as an exercise to increase literacy skills. Examples of narrative writing include novels, biographies, history, and newspaper articles. It is easily recognized by the format: “This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.” and so on.
• Teach your students to recognize persuasive writing. This is writing which lays out a logical argument. Examples of persuasive writing can be seen in job applications, editorials, and academic papers.
• Teach your students to recognize expository writing. This is writing which explains, informs or describes something. What you are reading now is an excellent example of expository writing. Newspaper articles can also fall into this category, along with encyclopedias and reports.

Teach the elements of storytelling. Children in this age-group will need to learn the basic elements of storytelling. This will give them the tools they need later in life in order to analyze the things they read.

• Elements of storytelling include beginning, middle and end, crisis or climax, and character. These are most easily taught to children when done in tandem with reading a book aloud over the course of a few weeks. This gives you the opportunity to discuss and analyze the text, so that they can see how these ideas work in practice. Solidify these skills by having them write stories of their own.

Introduce the Five Paragraph Essay. The Five Paragraph Essay includes an introduction, three body paragraphs (usually argumentative in some way), and a conclusion. This common form of writing will be used throughout their lives and should be introduced as early as possible.

• Introductory assignments could include a review of their favorite toy or game, a persuasive essay about why they should be allowed to eat more candy, or a biography of their favorite family member.

 

Teach the use of voice. Voice refers to who is “speaking” in a text. Voice can be but should generally not be mixed within a text. Being able to identify and manipulate voice will be important for your students to learn, as this will help them analyze the things they read.

• Common voices include first person (heavy use of “I/me”), second person (heavy use of “you”), and third person (heavy use of names and “they”). Tense can also be applied to each of these voices, modifying how it sounds and reads.
• First person example (past tense): “I went for a walk today. My dog, Spike, came with me. Spike likes to go on walks with me.”
• Second person example: “You went for a walk today. Your dog, Spike, came with you. Spike likes to go on walks with you.”
• Third person example: “Sarah went for a walk today. Her dog, Spike, went with her. Spike likes to go on walks with her.”

Avoid setting limits. Especially with elementary age children, try to leave as many doors open as possible within their exercises and assignments. Children at this age are very creative (a trait which will be very helpful later in life) and it is better for them if this creativity is not discouraged or downplayed.

• Children will also learn better by being forced to think for themselves, so giving them opportunities to do that (by leaving assignments and exercises open-ended) will help them significantly.

Keep it as fun as possible. Make learning fun. Children will be distracted easily if they find their work too boring or non-engaging. In fusing learning and play, you will ensure that your students are engaged and absorbing information.

• For example, with middle-school age children you can have them create a game and then write rules for the game. This will be fun but it will also force them to think about writing specific language which is also easy to follow.
• For elementary children, let them write, edit and illustrate their own books. This will work on developing their understanding of story and character, while simultaneously improving their ability to form correct sentences with proper spelling.

Teach pre- and post-writing process skills. It will be important for children to learn that there is more to writing that just putting words on a page. Teaching pre- and post-writing skills will teach children to analyze writing, as well as working to build their language skills.

• Outlines are an example of a pre-writing skill. Outlining what they intend to write will help learners work through logical processes. It will also teach them to think of elements of writing (different paragraphs or subtopics) as a unified whole, rather than pieces simply placed next to each other.
• Editing is an example of a post-writing skill. Editing their own work, as well as the work of others, will build language skills. This will make your students more competent writers, as well as increasing their confidence in their writing. If they know how to look for mistakes and correct them, they will be less restrained by fear of failure.

Teach phonics. Phonics is all about learning what sound letters make, how to identify those sounds, and how to work with them. Developing your students’ understanding of phonics will be key to teaching them to read and write.

• Teach your students to hear. They need to be able to listen to speech and recognize that those words are composed of individual sounds.
• Once they grasp the concept of those sounds, teach them to identify the sounds. For example, your students will need to be able to hear an “aaaaahhhh” sound and know that it is written with an “a”.
• Once they are comfortable identifying sounds, you will also need to teach them how to manipulate sounds within words. They should be able to recognize when words rhyme or when one word out of a set begins or ends with a different sound than the others. They should be able to think of their own examples as well.
• Teach compound sounds as well. You will need to explain that when certain letters appear together, it changes how they sound. For example, in English the “th” or “sh”, in Spanish the “ll”, and in German the “ch” or “eu”.

Teach the forming of words. Once your students have a solid grasp on letters and their associated sounds, you can move on to using those letters and sounds to form words. Read to them frequently at this stage, as well as writing lots of examples for them to look at. This will give them opportunities to see how words are formed. An important part of teaching word formation is teaching your students the difference between vowels and consonants. Teach them which letters are which and explain the necessity of vowels within a word. Teach the basic principles regarding where in a word vowels can go. For example, it is very rare for the only vowel in a word to go at the very end of the word but quite common to have the second letter or sound of a word be a vowel.

 Understand sentence structure. You students will need to learn and understand sentence structure once they have mastered forming words. Sentence structure is the order in which words or parts of speech go, the sequences in which they are used. Understanding sentence structure will be necessary if they are to form written sentences which sound correct. Often people will have difficulty writing naturally like this, even if they speak correctly.

• Your students should learn how to identify nouns. Teach them what a noun is and where it usually goes in a sentence. The easiest way to explain it will likely be the tried-and-true “person, place, thing or idea”.
• Your students will need to be able to identify verbs, too. Teach them about “action words” and give them lots of examples. You can have them act out different verbs in order to solidify the concept in their mind. Explain where verbs go in a sentence.
• Your students will need to be able to identify adjectives as well. Explain that adjectives describe other words. Teach them where these words go in a sentence and how they attach to other words

Teach proper grammar. Teaching proper grammar will be absolutely essential to your students’ learning to write sentences which can be understood and sound natural.

• Using parts of speech together is an important concept in grammar. Your students should develop an understanding of how nouns, verbs and adjectives interact and how they fit together. Where these words go in a sentence and when they must be preceded or followed by another is also important to understand.
• Tense is a key concept to understanding how to form proper sentences. Your students should learn and practice creating sentences which take place in the past, present, and future. This will teach them how words must be changed in order to indicate time. This is a complex skill and is often not truly mastered until much later.
• Conjugation and declension are other important skills. Conjugation is how verbs change, depending on how they interact with the other words in the sentence. For example, in English we say “I jump” but we also say “she jumped”. Nouns can go through a similar process, called declension, but it is nonexistent in English.
• Though it has largely been removed from English, many other languages have case systems which your students will need to understand if they are learning one of those languages. Cases denote the different functions that nouns and pronouns can serve in a sentence and, at least in those languages with a case system, how the case changes the noun (generally with a shift in suffix).

Don’t forget punctuation. A difficult skill to master, the use of proper punctuation will be vital to creating well constructed sentences. Later in life, proper punctuation is often seen as a mark of intelligence and education, so building your students’ skills in this area will be very important for opening up opportunities for them in the future.