Sample Practice: Level 5
Level 5: Advanced Solo Editing teaches your kid to do deep self-editing—of their ideas and the artistic flow of their own essays. We begin teaching kids about editing in Level 1: Complex Sentences and help your child build additional layers to the skill over the subsequent levels. Most adults and kids think of editing as the process of correcting grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. (aka, line editing). Line editing is crucial, but it’s only one part of the editing process. In Level 5, we also teach kids to edit the content of their ideas, and to do it before they focus on line editing. Is their argument sound? Can it be strengthened? How? We build up to this self-analysis skill over the previous levels because asking kids (or adults) to scrutinize their thought processes is a Big Brain Leap—and can provoke strong emotions. It’s much easier to think critically about other people’s writing and claims than our own.
Practice 5.3.1 uses the Doubting Games framework to help kids re-examine the arguments in essays they wrote in Levels 3 and 4. Your child will have already played the Believing Game on their essay in a previous practice. Lesson 5.3, like many of the lessons in Level 5, also helps kids develop the skills to compare arguments across texts, which is a high-level skill not generally taught until high school or college. We use a mixture of real-world, classic texts, including excerpts from Darwin, Newton, Einstein, and Locke, and invented texts to teach these skills. We also cover poetry rhythm analysis, story editing, source analysis, and citations in Level 5.
Learning to edit their own arguments is a transformative experience for developing minds. For most, it’s the first time they’ve ever had to step back from their claims and look at them with a critical eye—and it may be one of the only times they’re asked to do this work until they’re in advanced schooling or the adult world.
Later in Level 5, your child learns how to edit the mechanics of their essay to go beyond correct grammar and punctuation and into the art of beautiful prose.
Ready for your child to learn how to edit both the content and word power of their ideas at a deep level? Sign them up for June Writers Academy today!
