Essay Writing Exercises for Elementary Students

Very often, children find it challenging to write essays. And this is quite logical because it is difficult to express their thoughts on paper adequately. That's why school teachers should teach children how to write papers from elementary school. But why is it so important? First, it allows an opportunity to expand the vocabulary, causes a desire to read, and contributes to forming a creative personality.

And secondly, being able to write an essay is an excellent motivator for personal reflection. Finally, gaining complete freedom of self-expression, the child gets the opportunity to express themselves on a topic of interest without restrictions. Read below for ideas on how to encourage students to write great essays.

1. A Fictional Story from a Single Photograph

Behind each photo of the past is a real story, and the people in it had their unique destinies. They dreamed of something, set goals, and hoped for the best. So ask the students when the photo was taken and who the people in it are to each other. This exercise aims to develop children's creativity and imagination.

Guidelines: Prepare one or more retro photographs and have the students try to recreate or make up their own stories about the people in the picture, guided by the visual images. This format is also suitable for asking young writers to create an essay about a prominent person's biography: a writer, poet, artist, or scientist. It would be best to ask kids some guiding questions to help them in their writing:

1. Who is in the photograph?
2. Where are these people from?
3. What are they thinking about and experiencing?
4. What kind of life do they live?
5. What are they saying to each other?
6. What was their fate?

2. In One Hundred Words

Writing an essay of clearly one hundred words isn't as easy as it seems at first glance. While writing, students may find that they need more words to express their thoughts. However, the limits of the assignment will force them to weigh each word in their essay carefully. The more complex their ideas are, the harder it will be for them to meet the allotted number of words. In this way, however, young writers learn in practice how important brevity and conciseness are in their writing.

Guidelines: Choose a topic and ask students to write a hundred-word essay. The obligatory rule is that the work must retain the structure and express a complete thought. To complicate it, you can suggest using certain expressions, phrases, and words with symbolic meaning. To cope, students must be precise in their statements. While writing a piece in this format, students learn to adhere clearly to the structure of the assignment.

3. Creative Reimagining

This technique allows students to practice creating different forms of literary creativity. In addition, doing this exercise enables students to perceive and evaluate the same situation from different perspectives. But if you need more ideas on this topic, you can browse Trust My Paper reviews to ensure you find the required information on this site and help from professional writers if you need it.

Guidelines: Take a particular text or movie scene and ask students to rewrite it in a different style. For example, present a famous scene from a melodrama as a comedy, preserving the plot. Or rewrite a classic verse as a news report, and reimagine it as an essay. Another variation in this assignment is asking young authors to rewrite text passages in a different style. For example, they could rewrite a tragic scene from Shakespeare's Othello as a comedy or a scene from a horror story as science fiction.

4. Write a Letter to Your Younger Self

It's a very effective exercise for developing written language and strengthening children's mental health. In this way, they learn to understand themselves and their needs better and appreciate their accomplishments at this stage of their life's journey. Thus, before beginning the assignment, give students time to think about their challenges and how their older and wiser version of themselves would handle those issues now.

Guidelines: Remember that the preparatory phase can take just as long as writing the essay. For the assignment, children must see the younger version of themselves as a separate person to whom they can now, as adults, offer advice and support. At the end of the class, ask students to share their letters if they feel like it. It allows each of them to learn from the mistakes of others, which is just as valuable as competently expressing their thoughts.

Summing Up

In the end, we'd like to give a little advice to parents. An essential aspect of building a beautiful literary speech is a child's ability to talk about what they've seen, where they've been, and what they feel. In the process of conversation, slightly correct their speech, and ask leading questions. After a certain period, you'll notice significant improvement. And it means that writing essays will become a regular and easy task for your child.

Guest Blogger:

Cynthia Young is an academic writer with a wondrous love for literature and travel. She starts her day by reading articles in her favorite magazines and ends up writing her own. She has been writing articles for various blogs about education for several years now. She recommends Trust My Paper for help with essays.