In 2006, Christopher Beale completed his first novel at the age of 6 and set a Guinness World Record, beating the previous record by 42 days, as reported by The Independent UK. Starting from writing a story, the world’s youngest author served his passion for writing by generating a full 1500-word book.
Surprised much? You shouldn’t be.
You see, adolescents and toddlers learn to imitate whatever you expose them to. They start learning by expressing through symbolic means, such as creative drawings. As their age advances, their skill to learn and express grows into reading and writing. The emergence of early writing skills, such as name writing proficiency, therefore, prophesizes the child’s bright future in literary areas.
After parents, it’s the teacher’s responsibility to guide the youngsters’ expression of thoughts and ideas. He is responsible to understand the emerging learning patterns and behaviors in the students’ writings as well as keep aware of the most effective and novel teaching techniques.
Since elementary school children are at a sensitive age of learning and have a vivid imagination, each of them can be inspired to write and every teacher can use relevant online writing tools to expand the skills of their young pupil.
Want your pupil to break-free of the traditional paper writing? Use these online tools below to give them an instant boost for a free flow of ideas and ignite the writing spark in their imagination:
1. Storybird
Elementary students are keen storytellers, where all the credit goes to their creative side. Storybird is one such easy-to-use app enriched with artful visuals that cater to children of all ages. Besides storytelling, it also features expert-catered +300 writing lessons, quizzes, and prompts, where a student can choose from his preferred format from comics to poetry and a lot more.
Think you’ve hit the writer’s block? No problem. Storybird houses 8million writers across 100 countries, who are ready to inspire you with their creative pieces. Challenge, read, or write with the free trial or purchase the premium plan, becoming a member of the Storybird community is a piece of cake!
2. The Brainstormer
From the realities of life, reading or writing fiction can be the escape you can let your elementary students delve into. The Brainstormer is a creative hub for limitless friction writing and the gateway for your students to learn, make, edit, and use a unique combination of words. This wonderfully designed app allows you to use the wheel or slot for generating random word combos to amplify your student’s creative mindset.
The best thing about The Brainstormer is that it offers multifold features, in which you can use the World Builder to create story plots and settings and the Character Builder to create 3D characters for a slayer piece of fiction.
3. Grammarly
Even if you’re recommending your students to write a story online, you can’t help but have Grammarly at the tip of your tongue. It detects all the grammatical, spelling, sentence structure errors and helps improve the contextual use of words while expanding your vocabulary.
It also helps improve your writing style by suggesting appropriate words and sentence structures. In addition, it employs a simple user interface that projects simplicity of use, thereby promoting self-learning opportunity to correct grammar and language errors. Whenever you’re assigning a writing task for homework, ask your pupils to use Grammarly’s free version for writing practice online.
4. Hemingway App
Hemmingway App is an online writing tool named after Ernest Hemmingway, a celebrated author who believed in the simplicity of language in writing. This app allows you to evaluate the readability of your text and analyzes it for you to detect which sentences need to be changed from hard to simples ones.
The hard sentences are highlighted in red; if you see longer sentences highlighted in yellow, shorten them as a part of the readability task. Moreover, you can also learn about limiting the use of passive voice and adverbs. Letting your student’s use this free simplicity-focused writing application will help sow the seed for effective writing practice.
5. Writing Challenge
As the name indicates, the Writing Challenge is one of the best writing apps for elementary students. It challenges the writers by giving them a prompt to write their story, where you have to choose the one you like and start writing.
Ideas, words, sentences, characters, plots, and much more – Writing Challenge will provide you with all the necessary suggestions and recommendations to improve your writing and motivate you for future endeavors. Let your students use this app and see their interest in writing spark to the peak!
6. ReadWriteThink
Of all the best writing programs for elementary students, ReadWriteThink is the first-class initiative for parents, teacher and afterschool writing practice. It offers free material relating to essay writing, story maps, word family sort, word construction and much more.
If you’re a teacher who’s at a loss of ideas for enhancing the writing practices of your students, ReadWriteThink lets you access the Student Interactives section to disclose the creative potential of the children.
7. My Kids Way
Last in our list but on the top in hearts; My Kids Way is an interactive and engaging tool that offers educational media directed mainly at young students. This website is also brimming with sample essays as a guide for children to gain a writing advantage over their peers.
In each of the samples, note the simplicity of language that is fundamental to the development of better skills in future. If you want your students to practice essay writing, make sure you check this online tool!
