When kids first learn about commas, it’s helpful to ask them to say the word “comma” out loud whenever they see a comma in a sentence that they’re reading out loud as part of a worksheet or other school work (not when they’re reading a book for fun).

Practice 1.3.2: Captions 1 asks kids to apply what they learned in our video lesson on foundational sentence grammar by writing declarative sentences to describe a picture and labeling the subjects, predicates, and verbs of their sentences.

When we teach comma conventions, or any writing convention, we acknowledge that adults don’t always agree on everything.

This practice dives immediately into the more challenging plural forms.

Adults generally take it for granted that sentences are the building blocks of formal writing, but this was not always a given.

June Writers Academy believes strongly in the value of teaching our kids the history and reasoning behind Standard English writing conventions both because the history is fascinating and because it teaches kids why there is value in consistently using the conventions (and when it’s OK to break the rules).

Memes are fun ways to engage kids’ natural interest in the humor of the world around them, including the digital world.

Some children are more comfortable in the realm of fact and non-fiction than wild creativity, which is totally fine!

It may be difficult for some children to tap into their full creativity, particularly since we are asking them to think of gentle insults, not mean insults.