Week # 29

The kids put together the second tinker box today and had fun doing it. It turned out to be a night sky projection sort of thing.

Writing Skills

As I had been observing the writing skills of the group for a while now, I wanted to give them a few tips that might help them write a bit better.

Here are some ideas:

Before starting to write, figure out a couple of important things.

• Who – What is your audience? Who are you writing this for?
• Why – What is the purpose of this piece of writing? What do you want to achieve from it?

Being clear about the above dictates what you will write and what sort of language you will use. For instance, a story would differ tremendously from an essay. An essay written for kids will be very different than one written for adults. Maybe the target audience is the general public, in which case the language needs to be simple.

Other tips:

• Explain the contextual What, How and When very clearly
• Use short sentences, unless you can craft a long sentence correctly
• Speak out your sentence before you put it down on paper
• Don’t use too many fillers
• A sentence should ideally contain only one and
• There are ALWAYS points for presentation, even if you are told otherwise. The reader needs to be able to read it all easily with the least strain on their eyes.
• Use spaces correctly for instance 1, 2, 3 and 4.
• Last lines of the page are hard to write on, don’t be scared to use the next page.

Exercise

After going over some quick tips, Kashif gave them a quick exercise. He talked about cars, Elon Musk, Space X, climate change etc in a few sentences. Using what he said, the kids were tasked to write something in 10 minutes.

The sentences spoken were general and diverse enough that the kids could use many combinations of Who and Why. Once the kids finished, he read through all of them and gave them quick tips. We will continue with this theme for a few weeks and help kids write a bit better.

Blog Post

The kids will continue to write about the books they are reading or have read recently.