TOEFL® essay: Children' leisure activities

[Mirsepasi]

Children’ leisure activities
Some people believe that children’s leisure activities must be educational, otherwise they are a complete waste of time.
Do you agree or disagree?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your experience.

Different people will give different response to this question from their own characters, emotional concerns and even educational backgrounds. However when it comes to me, I believe that nowadays children spend so much time at school and attend various additional classes and sometimes they need to spend their leisure activities without educational base.
In the first place, the parents think playing is a learning process. Needless to say children are much creative than most of us. They still have a blank and original mind, they just use their own eyes to watch the world and use their ways to explore the world, while playing together with other kids, they can practically learn many things, such as how to cooperate with others and to help others. While playing with pets, they will how to take care of them, and learn to take care of other people as well. Moreover even computer games can be very good. Sometimes not only their leisure activities without educational base do not waste their time but also fill it with full of beneficial things.
In the second place, when parents think of school study, they think of textbooks and exam that is to say children have to do a lot of homework to practice what their kids learn at school and they have to memorize a lot of knowledge in order to get good scores.
These parents when want to buy a toy for their children they think it should has an educational effect on them or games have to make brain work. They think youngsters should do only those activities that benefit their knowledge and educate them and unattended kid hardly makes proper use of his leisure time even on holiday.
For instance, as a teacher I have seen the result of this point of view, children are deprived of enjoyment of their childhood years and their desire to play. The children who are not allowed to play and are forced to study can begin to detest the education process and the teachers.
In conclusion I would like to point out that, always leisure activities should not be educational. Education through fun is useful but children must have some free times to relax so that their enjoyment of childhood that is once in a lifetime would not be prevented.

[Mbuckhoff]

I would score your essay 4.0/5.0 due to some grammar and vocabulary issues. Nevertheless, I like the tight organization of the essay, with clear transition cues separating each paragraph. Nicely written!

Good luck!

Michael Buckhoff is an ESL and English Professor at California State University, San Bernardino and has been teaching TOEFL preparation courses since 1994.

[Mirsepasi]

Thanks so much Professor Michael BUckoff, Could you do me a favour and underline my error on the essay, Mirsepasi