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The Dreaded Report

© Cathy Malmrose

Our kids write book reports, social studies reports, all sorts of reports. Is this really an important skill or just part of the drudgery of education? It's likely that your child will grow up to write reports as an adult too: sales reports, work reports, all sorts of reports.

In all my experience teaching, I've never seen a child who naturally wrote great reports. Sure, some children learn report writing skills more quickly than others, but for the most part, writing good reports is a learned skill.

How do we teach our children to write good reports? First, we do all we can to reinforce good report writing at home. We sit beside them when they write their first book reports. We help them with spelling, punctuation, spacing and paragraph organization. As they learn more sophisticated writing, we help them with debate skills: building a good argument, covering the topic thoroughly, using a clear, consistent voice.

What else can we do along the way to reinforce good report writing skills? We can help them develop their ideas. For example, your child approaches you to tell you about a new toy. You can say, "Uh hu... Uh hu...." and be grateful when he's done talking, or you can ask questions: "Why is this new toy so cool? What about ___? Tell me more about it. How does it ___?" When you look for ways your child can round out his ideas, it helps him learn to cover the topic more completely. The questions will seem silly, the content will seem irrelevant, but that's just because we're looking at thing through our adult eyes, not through the eyes of a child, where even a plastic toy is magical.

There's another more direct way we can help our children learn how to write good reports. A dear friend of mine with three children found an excellent way to teach her children accountability for their actions. Whenever a child did something significantly wrong, she would assign them to "write a report" as their punishment. Her children are now grown and they are all fabulous writers, even though it didn't appear to be a natural skill for them.

I've recently started this with my own children. We have a small report, medium report and a long report, depending on the nature of the offense. A small report is written on a 5x7 card. A medium report is written on a notepad. A long report is written on a full sheet of lined paper. The page must be filled with complete sentences explaining 1) what the child did wrong, 2) why it was wrong, 3) how it will be avoided in the future. It doesn't matter if the child is off-base or doesn't write what I want him to write. He must answer the questions from his viewpoint, and then when I verify that he's completed the report, we talk about it.

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