Browse the Florida Department of Education website to get details of the FCAT writing test. The test prescribes different types of essays depending on the grade level of the student. Find details of the essay your child has to prepare: narrative essay for fourth-graders, expository essay for eighth-graders and persuasive essay for 10th-graders.
Give your fourth-grader a narrative topic through prompts such as "A Day We Went to the Zoo" or "An Unforgettable Day in My Life." For expository topics, choose examples such as "Eating Healthy Food" or "Importance of Reading." With a 10th-grader, provide writing prompts for persuasive essays such as "Convince a Friend to Continue Schooling" or "Persuade Your School Principal to Abolish the School Uniform."
Sit with your child and assess the essay he wrote for spelling and grammar. Mark out misspelled words and have him check them up in a dictionary. Look at punctuation and grammar, and using other examples, help your child understand the mistakes in his essay.
Mark words that you consider ambiguous or weak. Ask your child to explain the exact point she wants to convey, and encourage your child to browse a dictionary of synonyms to find the most appropriate word. Show your child how to test a variety of words by saying them aloud in the sentence to discover which sounds best.
Prepare an essay that is full of content arranged in a haphazard manner. Give it to your child and ask him to organize the content into introductory, body and concluding paragraphs. Explain how this improves the flow of the topic
Set a schedule for your child to read newspapers, magazines and Internet articles. Ask her to note down observations regarding sentence structure, ways of describing and the use of idioms and phrases. Encourage her to use a few of these while preparing her essay.
Give your child prompts on different relevant topics and ask him to come up with an outline of at least five ideas on which he will focus for each. For expository and persuasive essays, get him to think of quotes by famous personalities that connect to the topic and show how he can incorporate these in the introduction or the conclusion.