Students, especially
young ones, find it difficult to cope with writing tasks for some very
significant reasons. For one, the topic is far too abstract for their age and
interests; writing is not their forte in their first language; they can’t
relate to the topic; there are no cues to follow. Concretising writing is an
indispensable step not just in order to help students along with their writing
but more importantly perhaps in order to motivate them.
It doesn’t always
require too much preparation or effort on the part of the teacher to achieve
the goal of stimulating students’ minds so they can compose a text that will
answer the question and fulfil its communicative purpose.
Here is a task to try
with your younger students:
Draw a big heart on the
board and label it “big heart”. Following this, explain to the
children in their mother tongue that they are to draw a heart in their
notebooks and put five items in it; the items can be animate or inanimate. After
they have done so, ask “why”. So now the children have to form clauses
beginning with “because”.
Let us assume that
someone has drawn a silk shawl, a straw hat, a balloon, a dead leaf and
their best friend.
Why a balloon?
because I can go places in it/because I can see the
earth from high up
An extension of this would
be to challenge the children to link as many items in the heart as possible in a story. If we keep the items we chose above, their
text could read:
My friend put on her beautiful silk shawl and I picked
my wide-brim straw hat and got into a balloon which lifted into the blue sky
and floated over the green and yellow fields. We started drifting down and just
before we touched the earth softly a breath of air blew a dead leaf over our
heads.
