Tips: writing at home and using the children’s diaries

Get the child to re-read their sentence to you. Encourage them to point to the words as they read. If they haven’t drawn the picture yet, get them to do this. 

Further ideas of activities you can do include:

• write another sentence.
• if the teacher or a family helper wrote the sentence, then at home the children could re-write the sentence.
• practice re-writing the sentence to improve writing, ie. view the first time or two as drafts and then do a good copy, working on leaving spaces, forming letters the right way around (if some were back to front initially), using capitals and lower case letters correctly, etc.
• think about other words that have similar letters and sounds.

Most importantly, have fun! Reading and writing at home should be an enjoyable time for everyone.