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Palo Alto 2800 W. Bayshore Road (near Oregon/101) 650-424-1221
• Year-round, full-day program for ages 0-6 • Individualized Montessori curriculum • International curriculum (Chinese, Spanish) • Cultivation of thinking skills and personal values • Bilingual Chinese-English classroom option
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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 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 essen- tial 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/because/but/so….”) that indicate more complex thinking. Parents can encourage more elaborate experi- ences 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 learn- ers. About the Writer: Chuck Bernstein is president and founder of Early Learning Institute, a Palo Alto-based educational 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 administrators. Though his responsibilities are primarily administrative, he also teaches writing and presentation skills.
31 www.indiaparentmagazine.org
October 2019
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