Recently a parent in our Malaysia Primary and Secondary School Parents On Facebook group asked for ideas on how to teach a dyslexic child to write 'Karangan' (Essays in Bahasa Malaysia). It then occurred to me that in order to teach children who are visual learners, we need something visual and simple to remember.
Many of our kids in Malaysia learn 3 languages in school. This means they would have to write essays in English, BM (Karangan) or Chinese (作文) or Tamil. According to our current syllabus, primary school going kids start to learn to write essays some time around the end of lower primary or start of upper primary school ie around Standard 3 or 4.
In Standard 1 and 2, they quickly progress from learning alphabets to words and phrases. Then they learn to string the words and phrases to form sentences (or Bina Ayat in Bahasa Malaysia). A few sentences joined together make a paragraph. Put together several paragraphs and you have an essay.
As parents who are guiding our children at home, we should not stress ourselves over the number of languages the children have to learn and talk about how difficult it is for them. In fact there are many synergies. Though there are many differences naturally, there are also many similarities. One of them is essay writing/menulis karangan/写作文。
We have put together a free printable template in 3 languages for you to teach your child the basics of essay writing. You can use this template to explain how to write an essay in any language English, Malay or Chinese. Those who have kids who are visual learners will find this easier to grasp then looking at lots of sample essays with plenty of words.
Basically every essay should have an introduction, a few paragraphs to support the main idea and a conclusion. Each paragraph can be 2-3 sentences long for those just learning to write essays.
Our free printable shows an ice-cream. The introduction is the cherry. Moving along, you can have the chocolate ice-cream, the vanilla ice-cream and the strawberry ice-cream. Finally, you have the cone. The cone is the conclusion or summary of what you write. You can have more scoops of ice-cream in other flavours for longer essays. Just write more paragraphs with supporting ideas for your main idea/topic.
The ice-cream cone essay template can be used to explain to your child the basics of essay writing in a structured manner. You can use it for English Essay, BM Karangan or Chinese 作文. We hope you find it useful. This free printable is available for our website members only. Members can login now to download and print the essay template in pdf format.
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