One of the most rewarding parts of tutoring primary school students is helping them learn how to structure their thoughts in writing. Writing isn’t just about putting words on a page — it’s about organising ideas in a way that makes sense and, for young learners, this doesn’t always come naturally.
The challenge starts with how kids see writing. Many think of it as just filling up space or lines on a page of homework, without much thought about how sentences connect, how one idea should lead to another, or how it would feel like to be the reader digesting all this information. They might first write that the main character is a little girl with brown hair and blue eyes, then jump straight to a dragon that, inexplicably, she has been tasked with fighting. So sometimes the first step to writing logically is to teach them to think logically.
One of my favourite ways of achieving this is a visual aid. When students struggle with storytelling, laying out a simple outline of beginning, middle, and end, with setting and character running underneath the entire time, often leads to that “click” moment.
Beyond structure, it’s also crucial important to build confidence in young writers, since so many students hesitate to write because they’re just afraid of making mistakes, of seeming dumb, and of not living up to expectations. They worry about spelling, grammar, or whether their ideas are “good enough” or “smart enough”. But content always matters more than perfection, particularly in the beginning, like how a page of unstructured, misspelled writing is still always better than an empty page.
Exposure, patience, and practice come next (along with hopefully a lot of reading!). Younger students typically need a lot of time to absorb the fundamental concepts of articulation. Repetition isn’t a setback or a road bump, it’s pretty much the entire learning process, with the same lesson or technique often requiring multiple methods of teaching and examples before it really sticks. This means that we should always approach writing with a mindset geared towards each student’s individual pace, and remember to be appreciative of the small wins, like when a student remembers to use paragraphs for the first time.
Ultimately, writing isn’t just an academic skill relegated to a homework book — it’s a way of thinking and making sense of the world which can help students of all ages to find their voice.
Mica Krzyzanowski
