Summer Camps
what was seen or heard is another essential skill called “response to literature” in the California curriculum. • Supporting an opinion about the activity is a third es- sential skill: “persuasive writing.” Writing is thinking on paper. As children mature, their thinking should be encouraged to develop, too, so that they see the connections, causalities, and meanings among events. Writing develops in the same way: simple sentences (“The bird flew away….”) give way to compound sen- tences with conjunctions (“The bird flew away, and/be- cause/but/so….”) that indicate more complex thinking. Parents can encourage more elaborate experiences and, thus, thinking either directly through family activities or indirectly through reading and other cultural events. It takes effort, but those proactive initiatives are effective in establishing an intellectual and emotional foundation for articulate, expressive, and thoughtful learners. About the Writer: Chuck Bernstein is president and founder of Early Learning Institute, a Palo Alto-based edu- cational organization that operates three child development centers and two private schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. The programs serve over 500 students and employ 125 teachers and admin istrators. Though his responsibilities are primarily administrative, he also teaches writing and presentation skills.
• Attend as a family book readings at local bookstores or schools—This provides an opportunity for young people to understand that authors are people like them who did the hard work of preparing books for publica- tion. • Attend as a family cultural activities, like a movie, a play, or a concert, and then discuss them afterward— Describing what was seen or heard is an essential writing skill; in California schools, it is called “summary writing.” Analyzing the meaning and judging the significance of
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www.indiaparentmagazine.org
Summer Camps 2023
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