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Looking for opportunities to get involved with your child's learning? Here's what's coming up. April 1, 2017 Berryessa Unified School District - Parent University "Foundations For Effective Communication and Discipline" Would you like a little insight on how to increase effective communication and develop greater self-discipline with your kids? Having taught middle-school-aged tweens for 10 years, and now a mom of a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old, I can give you a few pointers! Berryessa families, sign-up with your child's school.  April 8, 2017 Santa Clara County Office of Education Families Learning Together - STEAM Event A Free day of learning activities based on STEAM - Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics. Fun for the whole family and free lunch, too! Register using this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/steamenglish2017
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While most people would prefer to sleep in on the weekends, I woke bright and early on Saturday, March 4th and headed over to San Jose State University. I was pumped up and ready to go for the San Jose Area Writing Project's Parent Session. The topic for the day - persuasive writing. So what did we do engage parents with writing? Here's a little peek into the highlights of our morning! First, we got parents involved in a warm-up activity. Here, Andrea and I invited parents to write their responses and thoughts on some debatable topics.
   Once they got comfortable with one another, we led another activity where a statement was read out loud. Without talking (or conferring with their spouse), parents had to move to my right if their response was "Yes" and to my left of their response was "No." After parents moved to each side representing their response, parents were to verbally convince members of the opposing side to abandon their stance and switch sides. Looks can be deceiving; these parents were amicable but surprisingly lively during the debate!  One of the more powerful discussions that came out of this morning was the importance of our role as parents on how our children develop as critical and empathetic persuaders. We want our children to be able to take a stand and defend it, and at the same time to be respectful and considerate of opposing views. Our group read an article on how parents could foster active listening and open conversations. If we want our kids to argue articulately on paper, we should model healthy conversations and disagreements with our kids at home. During the second half of our morning, we read mentor texts, wrote rough drafts, read each other's writings, listened to feedback, and then finished up our persuasive pieces before picking up the kids. Speaking of kids, take a look at them working in small groups with a writing teacher during their workshop.  So, are you ready to join us at our next session? Our next meeting on March 18 will be about Literary Essay. Register here and see you soon!
-Jaime Today, some parents and I celebrated Dr. Seuss's 113th birthday with a reading workshop at Adobe Systems. I'm so glad I was able to visit Adobe and share some reading tips with them. What a blast!  |
GenParenting ArticlesFor inspiration and helpful tips on parenting, check out my other blogs on GenParenting.com!
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