Childrens Writing

Improve Your Writing Skills to Appeal to Children

Children are demanding readers. They require fun, surprise, interesting and engaging stories. This course will train you in writing for children, understanding how child development and child psychology affects what children enjoy reading. 

Learn to engage your readers and create authentic stories.

This is a perfect course for:

• Authors looking to diversify their writing 
• Those with an interest in writing for young people
• Anybody delivering writing courses wanting to incorporate children's writing
• Hobby writers seeking a challenge to expand their skills

Let your imagination run wild, and share your creativity with children to influence their enjoyment in reading.

Lesson Structure

There are 10 lessons in this course:

1. Introduction
   • Understanding children
   • Child development
   • Learning -Habituation, Vicarious Learning, Classical Conditioning, Operant Conditioning
   • Children's cognitive development
   • Implications for Writers
   • Socialisation
   • Culture
2. Overview of Children’s Writing
   • Categories (fiction & non-fiction)
   • Understanding the marketplace
   • Bookshops, children's book awards, writers' events
   • Writing resources - personal experience, colleagues, publications, organisations
3. Conceptualisation
   • Introduction
   • Conceptualization
   • Generating ideas
   • Developing a concept - gathering content, direction, blueprint
   • Planning your writing
   • Tips for the beginner
   • Making meanings clear
   • Illustrative contexts
   • Glossing
   • Definition
4. Children’s Writing for Periodicals
   • Scope of periodicals
   • What publishers consider
   • Genre
   • Risk management
   • Reader interest and expectations
   • News values
   • Storyline
   • Perceived need
   • Cost and profit potential
   • Short feature articles
   • Submitting to periodicals - speculative, proposals
   • Periodical writing styles - technical, language, content, approach
   • Conciseness
   • Common problems that disrupt conciseness
5. Short Stories
   • Introduction
   • Elements of a short story
   • Theme
   • Short story plot
   • Short story characterisation
   • Assessing your short story
6. Non-Fiction
   • Introduction
   • Non-fiction genres for children - Textbooks, other
   • Characteristics of good non-fiction
   • Teaching goal
   • Organisation
   • Accuracy
   • Format and style
   • Mechanics of writing - word budget, organising chapters, writing structure, drafting, writing routine, writing equipment
   • Submitting a proposal - proposals, selling your idea
   • Reviewing your writing
7. Fiction
   • Settings
   • characterisation
   • fantasy
   • science fiction
   • adventure
8. Picture Books and Story Books
   • Picture books - for babies and toddlers
   • Books for pre-schoolers and early school children
   • Story books for young children
   • Story books - 4 to 8 year olds
   • Starting a child reading when they are younger
9. Editing your work
   • Introduction
   • Editing process
   • Self-editing
   • Things to look for - content, structure, presentation, accuracy, illustration, inappropriate language. etc
   • Grammar
   • Spelling
   • Ambiguity
   • Submitting for publication
10. Project
    • write a short story, picture book or children's page for a (hypothetical) periodical.

Aims

• Describe children’s cognitive development and target writing to be appropriate to various developmental stages.
• Explain the nature and scope of writing for children.
• Describe the process of planning a written manuscript of children’s writing.
• Describe the planning and processes involved in writing articles for children’s magazines.
• Develop a short story for children to read.
• Discuss the specific requirements associated with writing children’s non-fiction.
• Describe the various categories of children’s fiction and the writing processes involved.
• Explain the scope and nature of literature aimed at young children.
• Explain the scope and significance of editing skills and processes for children’s writing.
• Plan, evaluate, edit and present a piece of writing for children.

What You Will Do

• Develop lists of imaginary titles and brief descriptions of stories that would be appropriate in your society (or country) for children of different age groups.
• Analyse the page(s) in a text aimed at children in terms of language complexity and style, conciseness of the writing, content, graphic layout, etc.
• Determine concepts for children’s writing.
• Develop outlines that would help you to write about each concept.
• Develop a set of guidelines (or a plan), that a writer should follow in regular preparation of a children’s page in a newspaper. Consider what, in your opinion, is the purpose of a children’s page in a daily newspaper.
• Discuss how you would approach writing a comic, and why you think this would be the best approach for you?
• Write short articles or stories, suitable for situations such as:
  • An educational magazine.
  • A preschooler or infant school age magazine.
  • A teenage boy or girl magazine.
• Write a short story.
• Identify a non-fiction book for children which you would consider yourself suited to write.
• Write an outline for a proposed non-fiction book. In your outline, you would include a list of major subject areas (or chapters) that the book would cover and a brief description of the content of each chapter. Include a brief description of how the book would be illustrated (i.e. are photos appropriate, or line drawings, paintings, etc?). You would then write one or two pages for your non-fiction book.
• Write a fantasy, adventure or science fiction short story for a 7-8 year old, which fits specified criteria.
• Write a story for a 5-6 year old child.
• Edit some sample short articles.
• Plan, then write, a children’s short story, a picture book or children’s pages for a newspaper.

Comments from our Writing Students

"I found the course to be extremely helpful. It has given me the confidence and skills to present my work to publishers."
- Dilys

"The course demonstrated to me what I enjoyed writing about, the types of writing I was good at, and not so good at. It broadened my horizon to show me what was out there to write about. It gave me knowledge and confidence. I have continued to write, and in the future want to commence with the next course, but in the meantime, I have submitted various articles of mine to some magazines and have had nothing but positive feedback from all the editors and some of my work is to be published!! Which I personally feel is fantastic as I have only been doing this for a year or so. Thank you for opening up a whole new world of creativity to me which I can only enhance upon!!"
- Jo

• Study this course to learn how to create interesting and engaging stories for children and young people.
• This course will help you to build on your creativity and love of writing by developing your writing skills.
• Create authentic, fun, factual, informative, surprising and engaging stories with this course.
• Why wait?  Enrol now!

If you have any questions about the content of the course or studying with ACS, then please get in touch with us today - use our FREE COURSE COUNSELLING SERVICE to get in touch with our expert tutors. They will be pleased to help you!