#1 of 15 Ways to Teach Your Child to Write Using Books: Talk About Stories

My adult son, Ben, is my writing club. Almost all of my kids have spent time writing but he is a natural. We still have his first story. At age 6, he wrote descriptions of the evil lord's castle with ugly dogs fighting over the bones and the happy castle with puppies in the corner. He studies writing and challenges me, partly by quoting me back to to myself. But what we do most is talk about stories, both in film and on paper.

My mother and I did this. We read hours together and always stopped to go on a bunny trail sprung from the reading. My husband did this, stopping a movie to ask the kids, "Okay, what's happening here?" When we read stories with the children, we ask them what they see in the picture that gives them a fuller picture of the story. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland was the first place this was done, even to the placement of the pictures and text on the page, and Little Critter books are nothing special at all if you don't look at the humor (where Little Critter is really coming from) in the pictures.

When my children want to talk about stories, I always listen, whether it is something they have written or read or even an online anime program they are following. I once listened to my 15 year old daughter, Becki, go through the complicated storyline of every single Eragon book over pancakes at IHOP.

We all learn from stories and talking about them helps us to process them and apply them to our lives. If we are interested in stories, our children will want to produce them. They will become writers.