How to Help a Good Reader Become a Good Writer

With the widespread use of shorthand communication as a result of emerging technologies and society’s reliance on spelling and grammar checking tools, emphasis on writing well is slowly declining. At the same time, excellent writing skills are becoming more essential for young people to have, as evidenced by the changes to public school education and inclusion of the Free Response portion in Advanced Placement exams. In order to become a good writer, your child must first become a good reader. Reading introduces your child to different genres, new vocabulary and different styles of writing. It also exposes him to better writing than his own in order to help him improve. Here are three ways in which the Kumon Program can help your child become a better reader and, thus, a better writer.

 

In order to become a good writer, a student must first understand the basic mechanics of writing, from using the proper punctuation and capitalization to organizing sentences in paragraphs with a purpose and supporting details. By helping students view words as part of sentences and sentences as parts of paragraphs, the Kumon Reading Program helps to build a grammar-based reading fluency, which can ultimately help them to develop into a better writer.

 

The Kumon Program aims to help students learn to read critically. The Kumon Program incorporates a diverse variety of literary works in order to broaden each student’s academic horizons. This includes excerpts from fiction and nonfiction writing. As children progress through the Kumon Program, they will gradually build their reading comprehension skills, which in turn can transform them into better writers. The better a student’s reading comprehension is, the more likely the child will want to read for their own enjoyment and understanding. The student who reads frequently will be exposed to elements of good—and bad—writing, and will be able to use these elements in their own work.

 

The Kumon Recommended Reading List is an excellent resource to explore literature and texts that your child may not study in their regular classroom. The Kumon Recommended Reading List includes an excellent selection of works from Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning authors like Harper Lee and John Steinbeck, and works by Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen. In addition, the reading list is organized by Kumon Reading Level to help you easily identify the appropriate books for your children. The more a child is influenced by great writing, the more likely he or she will develop into a better writer. In that sense, it is important that children are exposed to a variety of literary texts to help them develop into better readers and writers.