Parent Tips: Breaking the rules

June Writers Academy asks your child to break conventions and write incorrect texts regularly (and then correct them). We do this because asking a child to deliberately write an ineffective text requires them to demonstrate their knowledge, albeit subversively, of what makes a text effective.

If you want to give your child feedback on these practices, check to see whether they’ve broken the rules in a variety of ways, including any particularly insightful mistakes. We’re looking for surgical errors, not chaos.

Paragraph Level+

Kids are generally gleeful when we ask them to break the rules. If this is not your kid—totally OK!—and they’re not sure where to start, you can have them first make a bubble web and then scramble items up so the lines go in odd places. Ask them to use the lines of the web to make their argument sentence as hard to understand as possible, and then write that ineffective logic as a paragraph.