Parent Tips: Practices 2.3.2 & 2.3.3

Practices 2.3.2 and 2.3.3 are Big Brain Leaps. We ask your child to translate their text analysis in Lesson 2.2: Themes & Reasoning into argument sentences and subclaims. For adults, this may seem like an easy enough step. For children, this is an enormous leap because synthesis/distillation from bottom-up analysis can feel like wandering around in the dark.

Indeed, most writing instruction in schools asks kids to come up with a point of view and then find evidence to support that view. This approach is a necessary skill, but it’s also much easier to teach to many kids at once than using evidence to develop a point of view. So the latter often goes untaught. June Writers Academy believes that it is critical for your child’s development as a thinker and citizen of the world that they learn early and often how to reason both up and down from evidence.

Argument Sentences

Some children may get tripped up on the idea of an “argument sentence” because the phrase evokes the image of angry people throwing spaghetti at each other across a table, etc. Teaching our kids that there are many far less violent and even civil ways to argue is also a part of their healthy development as critical thinkers and democratic citizens. Writing carries a point of view, and as such, is always making an argument, however subtle.