Responsibility for a child’s writing instruction is usually accompanied by an obligation to evaluate the child’s writing. Such evaluation can be a daunting task. The following suggestions will help you give your child’s writing the response it deserves and will also help you provide the feedback that will make your child a better writer. The

For many people the hardest part of writing is thinking of something to write about. This problem can be bypassed if you stockpile ideas ahead of time instead of waiting to think of an idea when you need it. Keeping an Idea Bank An idea bank enables you to collect and organize your ideas so

Writing is a very complex process because your brain must tend to many different things at once: you must form your idea, put it into words, think about how to spell those words, consider what to capitalize and how to punctuate, and remember how to form letters (or find them on a keyboard). In addition,

Stories have great power. In fact, God uses stories to teach us about Himself from Genesis to Revelation. Jesus taught in parables, which are usually defined as short fictitious stories that illustrate a moral attitude or a religious principle. Thousands of novels and short stories today pour from Christian publishing houses. Stories go where you

  Awkward. Even the spelling of the word is disturbing. If we look back, we likely have memories of high school or college teachers having scribbled the ugly “Awk” word in the margin of our paper, leaving us with the tremendously helpful insight that whatever it was we were trying to communicate didn’t quite work.

My husband, Robert, grew up on a farm in the 1950s. He attended one of the last one-room schoolhouses in northern Illinois, and his days were filled with the kind of adventures that happen to a little boy living in a rural setting. Our children never tire of hearing “Daddy’s” farm stories–like the time an

Recently, when a missionary friend was visiting from Japan, I offered to keep his son for a day to free him up for some appointments. Since Rees was alone, I invited my grandson Eli over as a playmate, hauled out a huge crate of Legos, and set the boys loose. I could barely pull them

With today’s technology we can send messages across the world in three seconds. In this fast-paced world, who needs to write a letter? With email, fax machines, and telephones (and the list goes on), who needs a good old-fashioned piece of paper and a pencil? Unfortunately, this is the view of most people today. According