Few parents happily describe a family night at home with the words 'editing' and 'essay' in the same sentence.  It seems that those two words drift into our lives at exactly the wrong moment.  Maybe you started by taking the one night a week that the entire family is home and planning a game night.  You bought ice cream and popcorn, opened a new game, setup the living room with pillows, and downloaded new music.   Then the bomb hits.  Your son, daughter, teenager, or 3rd grader suddenly remembers that they have an essay due the next day.  But, don't worry, they've written it.  It just needs to be edited. 

Now your family night has morphed into a homework night. It's quickly approaching 9:00 pm and your child needs to be in bed, but you just can't get her to focus on converting the mediocre monstrosity into a masterpiece.  Tempers are short.  Patience is gone. Everyone is tired.  

This, my friends, is how you don't edit your student's essay.  Yet, it's often how most of us find ourselves trying to teach our children to write.  When we should be patiently focusing on one skill to master, we are overwhelmed with the lack of general skills.  When we would love to take a few minutes to inspire our child to share what's in her heart, we find ourselves just wanting to escape.  When we could model great work ethic and responsibility, we play the blame game.  

How do we proactively prevent this weekly scenario?  There just isn't enough time to help all of our children individually with everything.  

Here are five tips to help avoid the family 'editing the essay' night: 

1. Acknowledge you are not alone.  We all find ourselves looking into our child's eyes as we try to help him remember what a verb is when we all know that this is the last place we both would like to be.  Let's just take a second to acknowledge that our child does not want to be there either.  
2. Focus on one skill at a time.  So what if his spelling is atrocious?  Let's work on punctuation and let the computer fix the spelling.    
3. Don't leave editing to the last thing in the afternoon or evening.  Just don't.  If your student forgot and suddenly remembers at 8 pm at night.  Oh well.  Maybe plan to edit for 30 minutes the following morning? Or suffer the consequences at school for having a non-edited paper? Your relationship with your child is more important than an imperfect essay.  
4. Teach your student to self edit.  This may or may not be taught in your child's school.  If not, then Scio Academy has you covered.  We will have some self editing practice videos available this coming November.  A student who can work her way through some basic editing practices by herself will always have a better paper!
5. Model good time management and planning skills.  Set aside time each week to have your student walk you through his projects that require your help.  Then show your child how to plan ahead using a simple planning page.  Sign up for Scio's newsletter to receive a free pdf of some planning pages for your student! 

We are all struggling to teach our children to be better writers.  Let's work together and help the writers of tomorrow!