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Students can write on a variety of topics.

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Help your child develop strong writing skills.

The summer gives you an opportunity to foster your child's writing skills in a way that emphasizes the creative, enjoyable aspects of writing. The following suggestions may help you do this:

Write down stories your young child tells you. Have your child dictate a made-up story or play to you while you write it down. Then read it back to him to see if he wants to make changes. You might also have him illustrate the story. Staple the pages together to create a book.

Attend more to the meaning than the mechanics. In an effort to bolster your child's confidence, be positive about his efforts and focus more on what he did well than on technical errors.

Provide opportunities for your child to write. The list below offers examples of many types of writing activities that children enjoy. Many magazines for children publish stories by children. One magazine, Stone Soup (stonesoup.com), is written entirely by children. There are few things more thrilling for a child than seeing something he has written get published.

Display your child's work. This is the best way of showing appreciation for his writing.

Take advantage of technology. By fourth or fifth grade, if not before, your child should be able to use a word-processing program. He will find that word processing speeds up the writing process, provides an easy way making corrections, and prints a legible copy. Word processing is especially welcome to those with handwriting difficulties.

Serve as a model for your child. If your child sees you writing, he will be more inclined to write. Let him witness the process you go through as you write, including writing a rough draft, editing, and proofreading.

Give presents related to writing. You should be able to find something from the following list to give to your child as a gift: magnetic alphabet letters, pencils with your child's name, pads of paper, a pencil sharpener, fancy erasers, personalized stationary, a stationary-making kit, dictionary, thesaurus, and a diary.

Write Ideas

Suggest these writing activities to your child:

letter to a friend, relative, or pen pal

story submission to a children's magazine

letter to a favorite children's book author

postcard while on vacation

thank-you notes

invitations

family newsletter

a journal

lyrics from songs

letter to a government official

request for a free sample from a company

letter to a celebrity

child's written rationale for a purchase

captions for original artwork or family photos

script of a play

telephone messages on message board

letter to a newspaper

home-made birthday cards or personalized get-well cards

letter to a tourist bureau requesting information

Dr. Kenneth Shore is a school and family psychologist in NJ, and a part-time instructor at Rutgers. Visit his website at drkennethshore.nprinc.com .

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The summer gives you an opportunity to foster your child's writing skills in a way that emphasizes the creative, enjoyable aspects of writing. The following suggestions may help you do this: Write down stories your young child tells you. Have your child dictate a made-up story or play to you while you write it down.

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Students talking about a book.

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courtney robbins
Communication skills

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Communicate

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Being respectful

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Establish Group Agreements

Deciding on group norms, or agreements, right from the get-go will give each student a voice and provide accountability for all. Although Thinking Collaborative's " Seven Norms of Collaboration " (pdf) are designed to be used with adult groups, you can use them to inspire age-appropriate norms. Children (depending on the age) might come up with things like "one person talks at a time," "respect each other and all ideas," and "no put downs." A poster of the shared agreements can be displayed and when necessary, called attention to when a student or group needs a reminder.

Accountability is an important factor in group working agreements. Since a teacher must find creative and effective ways to monitor multiple groups working at once in the classroom, assigning roles can be incredibly helpful. For example, if students are working in groups of four reading and analyzing a news article, you may ask each group to pick an investigator, a recorder, a discussion director, and a reporter. For the group to be successful, each child must complete the tasks that accompany his/her role.

Teach Them How to Listen

Good listeners are valued but rare in our culture. I share this with students. I also tell them that people who really listen-make eye contact, offer empathy, refrain from cutting others off-are easy to like and respect.

Save the Last Word for Me is a great activity that allows students to practice listening. Provide several rounds of this structured activity, followed by time for students to reflect on the experience and evaluate their own listening skills.

Children also need opportunities to restrain themselves from speaking in order to keep their attention on listening. Consider adding "Three, Then Me" to the class norms. This simply means that before one can speak again, they need to wait for three others to share first.

Teach Them the Art of Asking Good Questions

Have the class generate questions on any given topic, writing each one on the board. Decide on the most pressing and interesting questions of the bunch and discuss with students what makes those particular ones stand out. Talk about the types of questions that more often yield the best responses-those that are open-ended, thoughtful, and sometimes even daring.

Explain that well-received questions are neutral and don't make the respondent feel like they're being interrogated. Introduce students to invitational question stems such as, "When you think about ______, what comes to mind?" and, "Considering what we already know about ______, how will we ____?" As a scaffold, provide a handout with question starters for students to use during group discussions.

Students also need to know about wait time. Explain-better yet, demonstrate-that once someone in the group poses a question, a few seconds of silence are necessary, giving everyone time to think.

Teach Them How to Negotiate

A group member who speaks the loudest and most frequently may get the most said, but that doesn't mean they'll convince a group of anything. A good negotiator listens well, shows patience and flexibility, points out shared ideas and areas of group agreement, and thinks under pressure.

After sharing this list with students, generate together more characteristics to add to it. Indulge them in a brief activity called "Build a Consensus." In this activity, set the timer and give mere minutes to group plan a mock birthday party, a field trip, or a group meal so they can practice their negotiation skills. Now that they've been introduced to this skill, rehearsing it in a low-stakes, engaging way, they can next go more deeply into consensus decision making using a central text.

Model What We Expect

When it comes to creating a highly collaborative classroom, teachers need to frequently model listening, paraphrasing, artful questioning, and negotiating. In a student-centered classroom, there's less direct instruction. What we find ourselves doing most often is facilitating learning experiences for the whole class and smaller groups. The ability to effectively facilitate a group is a 21st-century skill crucial to success in the university and the work world.

This reminds me of the design company IDEO. An employee there was promoted to guide a team in redesigning the shopping cart not because of seniority but because "he's good with groups."

Group Brain Power

Learning, and higher-level learning such as synthesizing information from several documents or analyzing scientific data, can hit much deeper when done collaboratively. Lev Vygotsky's seminal work asserted that social interaction is a fundamental aspect of learning. And if he were alive today, he would most likely agree with the saying "two minds are better than one." He might add, "Better yet, how about three or four?"

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Deeper Learning: A Collaborative Classroom Is Key | Edutopia

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Deciding on group norms, or agreements, right from the get-go will give each student a voice and provide accountability for all. Although Thinking Collaborative's " Seven Norms of Collaboration " (pdf) are designed to be used with adult groups, you can use them to inspire age-appropriate norms. Children (depending on the age) might come up with things like "one person talks at a time," "respect each other and all ideas," and "no put downs."

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Courtney Robbins