Help Your Reluctant Writer Overcome Their Writing Hesitation

How to homeschool your reluctant writer in 5 easy steps

Use these tips for reluctant writers with your homeschool students

Step 1: Let’s make sure it’s not a physical or developmental issue.

First, before you try to engage your reluctant writers, you’ll want to ensure that your child isn’t balking at writing tasks because of a physical or developmental problem, such as dysgraphia or a lack of physical hand strengthen.

Dysgraphia is a Specific Learning Disorder that affects a person’s ability to write by hand. Sometimes it is just a physical, motor issue; sometimes it includes a language component; but often, it just looks like messy handwriting and horrible spelling, no matter how much thorough instruction and practice the child has had.

To learn more about dysgraphia and it’s symptoms, watch this video from the National Center for Learning Disabilities.

A lack of physical hand strength (or fine motor skills) can also cause your child to struggle with holding a pencil properly to write for more than a few seconds at a time. If your child is putting all of their focus onto how to write, it’s going to be difficult for them to think about what to write.

To learn more about strengthening your child’s hands and fine motor skills, hop over to our sister site, Whole Child Homeschool’s, article when you’ve finished this one.

Step 2: Find an interest

Find an interest and use that to your advantage.

What does your child love most? Have them write about what they already know. I have a friend whose son in really into wrestling, so she lets him write about wrestling stars and matches. And if it gets your reluctant writer to put thoughts onto paper (or screen) who cares what the topic actually is, right?

When my oldest son was around 8 or 9, he was really starting to be into Legos and Star Wars. So, I got him a Lego Star Wars Encyclopedia and had him write about those characters. In fact, I have a whole set of 36 Star Wars, Rogue One, and Clone Wars Character Reports for your kiddo to work on informative writing skills as well as grammar skills in a way that holds their interest and doesn’t feel like torture.

Step 3: Use alternative ways to record their thoughts

How about letting them type or dictate their work?

Younger kids will happily let you write down their thoughts for them. Once they hit age 9 or 10, let them learn how to type (many kids don’t have the fine motor skills to really type before then) for their writing assignments.

Or, if typing is really a struggle or if they don’t want to dictate to you, consider letting them use a speech to text app (check out this list of the best apps available)

Step 4: Plan out what they will write before starting to write

Use brainstorming and mind mapping first.

Kids and let’s admit it—grownups too, often shut down when we feel overwhelmed.

Does your reluctant writer just not know where or how to start? Just like getting directions from Google maps before we start on a cross country road trip, our kids may need a map to get to the end of that writing assignment.

As a professional who helped kids with writing assignments (I was a speech-language pathologist before I became a full time homeschool mom), I always had kids start with a mind map. Sometimes they are called brainstorming worksheets.

Why will this help? Many kiddos that struggle with writing (and language) think in pictures, not in words. Making their writing assignment into a kind of picture by mapping it out can really help them to organize their thoughts.

Step 5: Don’t start at the beginning

Write the middle part first, then the beginning and end.

Teach your kids to write the middle part, the body of the information first. Then they can go back and write an introduction paragraph that tells all of the topics in the body.

The conclusion paragraph should just be a rewording of the introduction paragraph or a summary of what was talked about in the body paragraphs. That makes it much easier to think about writing when it is in chunks, instead of such a huge and overwhelming task.

More Resources for Your Reluctant Writer

One of the best things I did to help my oldest son, who really struggled with knowing what to write, was to give him very structured writing assignments, like this Galaxy Wars Character Reports. He used the Star Wars Character Encyclopedia to fill out these printables. And he didn’t grumble about it because it was “easy” and it was something in which he was interested.

There’s a similar set of Dinosaur Reports in this Dinosaur Unit Study on our sister site, Whole Child Homeschool.