Parent Tips: Practice 2.8.2

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! If this is your kid, please reassure them that adult writers also do some or all of this pre-writing work when we’re writing longer texts. Your child will eventually not need this scaffolding to write a paragraph, but they’ll use a similar process to write essays and other longer texts soon enough. Getting comfortable with this process now will make writing those longer texts a small leap to take.

The Pre-Writing Sequence

1. Make a list of everything you know about the topic

2. Brainstorm themes, including the invisible ones and the ones only you can see

3. Brainstorm the reasoning behind the themes

4. Transform your themes and reasoning into an argument sentence

5. Create a bubble web of your argument, noticing all the connections between the bubbles. Be sure to number the bubbles in your final web in the order that you want to write your information in your paragraph.

How will you know if your kid needs to do more pre-writing? Telltale signs are running out of things to say after one or two sentences or using filler words to stretch out a thin or repetitive analysis. This is not a mechanical writing issue, this is a thought-work issue. Your kid needs to step back and think through what they’re trying to say.

Practices 2.8.2-2.10.5 are also bulk paragraph writing practices for kids who need to get used to writing at the paragraph level.