Parent Tips: Lesson 2.10

The idea that we change our writing to suit different situations is a Big Brain Leap, and a key concept for ensuring that your child becomes a flexible writer, able to adapt to different writing situations with ease. Ideally, your child grows up to be someone who can write government laws, scientific papers, and novels (or some other combination), if desired, because they are both flexible and authentic in their writing. 

In Lesson 2.10, we help kids explore this idea by beginning to tease apart style and genre and making them aware of all the moving parts of how they write, not just what they write. Most kids will probably be familiar with the idea of genre from school, though they might only be familiar with academic genres. We ask them to go two steps further and think about genre more widely and style as a separate but related concept. For this reason, it’s critical that kids go through each element of our style checklist in their verbal analysis of the prompt text. Doing a quick job of this step will make it harder to do the next step of the practice.

Lesson 2.10 is a fun series of practices because kids can learn a lot from mimicry, and tend to enjoy trying on different voices. The series is also the last of Level 2’s bulk physical writing practice for paragraphs. By the end of this lesson, your child should be physically and mentally comfortable popping out paragraphs (or, for some kids, essays) for all kinds of writing situations.