What to do when your child’s writing doesn’t follow linear time conventions.

We’ve written before about the importance of teaching kids to write multi-layered arguments early in their development process. Writing three-layered arguments is the key work of our Level 2: Arguments in Microcosm program, but most kids and adults don’t immediately understand what this means—or looks like. So, here is a breakdown of what the different layers look like when it comes to kid writing.

Adults can have strong feelings about the best way to teach kids to write. A surprising number of us wax poetic for hours about the joy of sentence diagramming, while an equal number are driven to drink by the memory. Some adults believe outlines are the only way to organize thoughts in the pre-writing stage, but others are fine with outlining or bubble maps. (And a shocking number don’t make a habit of organizing their thoughts before they write.) So, what is the best way to teach kids to write?

Some kids will be able to dive right into writing paragraphs by Lesson 2.8. (Note that we will have asked your child to spend extra time on extension practices for Lesson 2.4 if we thought they needed more practice on paragraph writing basics before they moved on to Lesson 2.5+.) Others will need to use part or all of the scaffolding sequence we taught in Lesson 2.3, Lesson 2.4, and Lesson 2.7 to complete Lesson 2.8. That’s OK!

Lesson 2.8 is about writing paragraph content in chronological order, but it’s also about teaching kids to think about the best ways to organize their thoughts.

Lesson 2.8 is about writing paragraph content in chronological order, but it’s also about teaching kids to think about the best ways to organize their thoughts.

In Practice 2.3.3: Creating Argument Sentences, we teach kids to build argument sentences that already contain two layers of thought.

See what a typical Greek and Latin roots practice looks like in our curriculum.

The idea that we write differently in different situations is a Big Brain Leap, and a key concept for ensuring that your child becomes flexible writer, able to adapt to different writing situations with ease.

Most kids learn opinion writing very early in their school career because kids love telling people how they think the world should work.

If Practice 2.4.1 was a Big Brain Leap, this is an even bigger Big Brain Leap; in yes, what is a long series of Big Brain Leaps in this chapter.

Practice 2.4.2 is a Big Brain Leap. Your child will be asked to see structure where they might initially just see a bunch of words.

Practices 2.3.4 and 2.3.5 ask kids to analyze how writers connect ideas in a paragraph.

Practices 2.3.2 and 2.3.3 are Big Brain Leaps. Your child will be asked to make connections among ideas, and then clearly state common themes.

Lesson 2.2 is all about inventing a fantasy country. We include this lesson in Chapter 2 because it underpins the work kids do throughout the June Writers sequence on inventing a language and because it’s an opportunity to introduce the idea that language is intertwined with culture and government; it’s not static. We want kids to have a sense of control and ownership of English as a language, no matter who they are and where they were born.

It may be difficult for some children to tap into their full creativity, particularly since we are asking them to think of gentle insults, not mean insults.