Activities to Evaluate Writing Skills

Here is a list of activities that you can use to evaluate your very young learners writing skills:

Evaluating writing skills in very young learners of English, especially those just beginning their writing journey, involves activities that are more about encouraging attempts at writing and understanding the writing process than about assessing conventional writing skills. Here's a list of suitable activities:

·         Letter Tracing:

o   Provide worksheets where children can trace letters. This helps in assessing their familiarity with letter shapes and their fine motor skills.

·         Drawing and Labeling:

o   Ask children to draw a picture and then label it with words or simple sentences. This activity can assess their ability to connect words with objects or ideas.

·         Fill-in-the-Blanks:

o   Create simple sentences with missing words and ask children to fill in the blanks. This can assess their vocabulary and understanding of sentence structure.

·         Copywriting:

o   Give them simple words or sentences to copy. This can help in assessing their handwriting and ability to replicate letters and words.

·         Building Words with Letter Tiles:

o   Use letter tiles to form simple words. This activity assesses their understanding of how letters combine to form words.

·         Writing Simple Words:

o   Ask children to write simple, familiar words like “cat” or “sun.” This helps in assessing their ability to write and spell basic words.

·         Creating a Book:

o   Children create their own little book with drawings and some words or sentences. This is a holistic activity that assesses their ability to narrate a story in written form.

·         Write a Postcard:

o   Have children write a postcard to a fictional character or a real person like a family member. This can be a few words or a couple of sentences.

·         Journals:

o   Encourage children to keep a simple journal where they can draw and write about their day.

·         Word Matching:

o   Match written words to pictures. This assesses their reading skills and understanding of the correlation between words and their meanings.

·         Sentence Formation:

o   Give children a set of words and ask them to arrange them into a coherent sentence.

·         Descriptive Words:

o   Show children an object and ask them to write down adjectives that describe the object.

·         Story Starters:

o   Provide the beginning of a story and ask them to write one or two sentences to continue it.

·         Label Classroom Objects:

o   Have children write labels for common objects in the classroom.

·         Name Writing:

o   Practice writing their own name. This is often one of the first writing tasks young learners become proficient in.

These activities are designed to be engaging and suitable for young learners who are just starting to write. They focus on developing basic writing skills, such as letter formation, word writing, and beginning to express ideas through drawing and writing.