Writing skills can be cultivated. As a student progresses through school, composition writing will play a major role in the English Language examination (often a weightage of close to 30% of the total marks). Opportunities for writing compositions in school are often limited due to time constraints. Since practice makes perfect, it benefits students to write compositions on their own at least once a week.
Purposeful Composition Exercises: Stop, Think and Plan
There are 30 composition exercises. Each lesson starts with reading. The title of the model composition gives students an idea of what the story is about. Reading the model composition prepares them to generate ideas for their own compositions of the same or similar title.
Prompts provided here help students to think about what they want to add in their composition or how to link the information. Students can then begin to form ideas for their compositions.
Progressive Writing Skills
Writing exercises begin with a single picture with prompts before progressing to 4 pictures in sequence. Prompts have been meticulously designed to guide students, step by step, in writing their compositions. Answers to the prompts in complete sentences can form the bulk of the compositions! This helps to build up writing skills through thinking about the answers to the questions, and eventually, adding more details of their own when writing out the whole composition.
Teacher’s Guide
The Teacher’s Guide provides practical support to teachers and parents in engaging students to understand the development of ideas in the model compositions. The set of follow-up questions which students are required to answer reveal how one idea should flow naturally to the next when reading and writing compositions. This would help them improve in their own composition writing.
