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Parent Resources for Intermediate Students
Write at home! Enlist the help of your students’ parents to encourage and
practice writing skills. Try these fun “at home” activities:
- Political Scavenger Hunt
- How politically smart are you? Do you know who your representatives are in your district? Do you know who will be running in the next election? What do you really know about them? Take some time with your family to research the people who are or will be representing your interests. http://www.votesmart.org/
- Senators (2):
- Representative:
- State Senator:
- State Assembly/House:
- What is the address for your U.S. Representative in Washington?
- What is your representative’s address when he / she is in Indiana? In his / her district?
- Did your Representative take the Political Courage Test?
- If so, what were his/her top two legislative priorities?
- Where did he/she go to school?
- Where was he/she born and where does he/she live now?
Take the time to write a letter to one of the candidates or representatives to share your thoughts on one of the issues on the Political Courage Test.
- Article Analysis for All
- Directions: What can you do with all those Weekly Readers, National Geographic for Kids magazines, and local newspapers? Cut them up! As a family, find interesting articles and gather them in an envelope. Once a week, glue one article into a $.99 notebook. Read the article together as a family. During the week, pass the notebook around to each family member. Ask each person to write or draw his or her thoughts about the article. Invite guests or extended family to include their opinions as well. Dinner conversations may never be the same!
Teachers: Send home this list of possible questions for families to glue inside the notebook for ideas:
- What is the author’s message to the reader? Do you agree?
- What are the facts in this article? Do you have any questions?
- What are the author’s opinions? What are your opinions?
- Do you like the headline? Make up a different headline for this article.
- Did the article’s lead sentence interest you? Write a new lead sentence.
- Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees?
- Problem: You don’t know where all your money is going. Solution: Hire your child to analyze and rework the family budget (or parts of it).
Reward: Half of any money saved will be given to the child. *
Depending on how old your child is, assign the grocery budget, the entertainment budget, or the whole budget for evaluation. Lead your child into figuring out what they need to know in order to succeed by asking questions:
- How does our family spend money now?
- How could we save money in the future?
- What is the difference between needs and wants?
Once your child has figured out how to help your family save money, ask him / her to write a family proposal including a contract for everyone to sign that supports your efforts to save money.
For an example of a budget just for kids, go to: PBS Budget for Kids. For free online budgets, go to either BudgetSimple or The Beehive.
* Or another appropriate reward!
- Questions, Anyone?
- One of the biggest hurdles in any kind of writing is teaching kids to ask the right questions: good questions promote thorough research and focused writing.
Here are some tips:
- Prior to any investigative studies, send students home with books and resources in their interest area. Ask families to read the books together and make a list of all the new facts they learned together.
- Challenge families to write down as many questions as they can about their subject.
- Encourage parents to decide with their children which questions would be easy to find answers to and which would be more difficult. After marking the more challenging questions, families could then debate which question would be the most interesting one to explore. This time spent in reading and in conversation should jump-start your students’ research or writing assignments.
- Send home a parent handout with examples of good questions. Try YouthLearn’s article on The Art of Asking Good Questions for a good explanation of factual questions, interpretive questions, and investigative questions. This site also explains how to play The Question Game at home.
(2001-2003). Teaching Techniques: The art of asking questions. Retrieved November 9, 2007, from YouthLearn Web site: http://www.youthlearn.org/learning/teaching/questions.asp
- Picture Perspectives
- The next time you have a family outing, grab a camera or two, and give family members turns taking pictures of the event. After you get home and have the pictures printed, spend an evening putting the photos in chronological order in a scrapbook. Give family members space to write captions and memories for each picture they took.
As you celebrate your final product, discuss the pictures, the writing, and the perspectives. Were there more close-ups or landscapes? Why? Did some family members tend to take the same types of pictures? How are photographs a form of art? How closely did the written text match the pictures? Did other family members have the same memories of that moment? Consider giving family members space to write additional details for each picture.
You could also gain fresh insights into your family by writing stories about old family photos. Find a picture with your whole family present, and take some time to talk about the moment that the camera captured. Where were you? What were you doing? Who else was there? Why was a picture taken?
Now, ask each member of the family to write or dictate the story behind the picture, with themselves as the main character. Pop some popcorn and take turns reading each other’s narratives, enjoying each individual’s perspective.
- A Chain of History
- Most kids are unaware of how much “history” their relatives have lived through. Ask students to start a chain letter or chain email that could be circulated through their extended families. Family members would read the letter or email, adding their own content before sending it on to the next member on the list. Students would need to include the names and addresses of family members, and put them in the order that the letter or email is to be sent.
Each person in the family would answer the following questions:
- What year were you born?
- What childhood memory do you have that would “date” you by showing what time period you grew up in?
- Describe any historical events that have taken place in your lifetime (for example, wars, economic depressions, world events, social movements, presidencies, etc.). What impact did these events have on your life?
After the letter or email has been circulated back to the student, they could compile the information into a family history book. You may want to suggest that students try a digital scrapbooking website like picaboo.com to publish their text along with family pictures.
- Rubber Egg Comics - a science connection idea
- Work with your kids on writing detailed descriptions and have some eggstra fun along the way!
- Gather a hard-boiled egg, two cups of vinegar, and a clear jar or glass.
- Put one cup of vinegar and the egg gently into the jar, to be left alone for one day.
- What do you think will happen? Write a prediction.
- Closely observe the egg. Write a description of what you see. (Bubbles will be rising.)
- At the end of the day, gently feel the egg. Write a description of what you feel. (The egg will be soft.)
- Dump out the old vinegar, and add a new cup of vinegar, leaving the egg in for one week. What do you think will happen? Write your prediction.
- At the end of the week, feel the egg. Try dropping the egg (not at a great height!). Write a detailed description of what happens. Incorporate your description of the event into a comic strip.
Parents and Teachers,
Eggshells contain calcium carbonate, which makes them hard. Vinegar is an acetic acid. When the egg and the vinegar combine, a chemical reaction takes place and carbon dioxide is released. (This is where the bubbles come from.) This reaction continues until all the carbon in the egg is used up, the shell softens and becomes translucent.
- Mathematical Cooking
- The intermediate grades are a time for students to learn to use the basic mathematical operations in real world contexts. This is a time when children should be encouraged to measure and record the dimensions, temperatures and volumes of things in their environments. In addition, children need to practice using the basic mathematical operations on these measurements to solve problems.
One readily available home activity is for students to have practice in doubling or cutting the sizes of recipes.
Have a child find his/her favorite recipe, and determine the number of servings it makes. Now have the child reduce the size of the recipe to fit a single relative, or double the recipe for a big family feast. Have the child write the recipe on a card and insert it with a note describing what he/she did to share that favorite recipe as a special gift. It is important to remember that the final stage, of explaining what was done is actually the “math” in this exercise. The ideas are the mathematics. Just the computation results on the recipe card without any writing or explanation contains no math.
- Establishing Strong Spelling Skills
- Establishing strong spelling skills is a challenge for students, parents, and teachers. Parents can help by making children more aware of spelling and its challenges. Playing games with words and spelling subtly lets children know that spelling well is valued. Try having family car quizzes on how to spell names of approaching stores, streets, locations or even favorite books or sports during those commuting moments. Also, playing a game like Scrabble or Boggle is great family fun and rewards correct spelling! For a short article about supporting writing conventions at home, "Supporting Writing Conventions at Home."
- Limerick Laughs
- Nurture rhyme, rhythm, and rolling laughter by
assigning family limericks. Family members will
cooperate in composing limericks for each member
of the family, including pets if need be. A gentle
reminder about respect will keep limericks from hurting
feelings. Edward Lear, a nineteenth century Irish poet, was
a master of rhymes and nonsense verse and often credited in
making the limerick rhyme popular. A limerick is a five line
poem which follows a AABBA rhyming scheme:
A Clumsy Young Fellow Named Tim
A clumsy young fellow named Tim (A)
was never informed how to swim. (A)
He fell off a dock (B)
and sunk like a rock. (B)
And that was the end of him. (A)
By Bruce Lansky
Suggestions:
- Send home a tip sheet for writing limericks, along with copies of limericks for families to read together.
- Suggest the use of a thesaurus or online thesaurus such as http://www.rhymezone.com.
- Encourage families to start off by listing words that rhyme with each person’s name. Nicknames could be used for easier rhyming.
- Limericks could be illustrated and compiled into a family limerick book.
Check out the Limerick Factor Online or download a Limerick Handout.
- In Laughing Order: The Comic Strips
- When children read or write
about events, they must keep the
major actions in order. Children
can develop a sense for order
while reading comic strips.
Comic strips use dialogue as well
as illustrations to tell a story.
What you’ll need: Your child’s favorite comic strip.
What to do: Find a comic strip that you and your child
enjoy. Before reading the strip, cut it out and separate the
frames. Mix them up and ask your child to put the frames
in the correct order. Once they are in order, have your child
read the comic strip and tell you what the strip means or is
saying. Now, work together to create an alternate dialogue
that might also fit this strip.
Source: READ*WRITE*NOW Activities for Reading and Writing Fun http://www.udel.edu/ETL/RWN/Activities.html
- Family Photo Stories
- Peruse your family album and select a photo that shows details of action, dress, or scenery (rather than a formal portrait). Each family member should then write his/ her own paragraphs describing the event, time, place or action depicted in the photo. These can be real or imaginary scenarios. Read each other’s stories.
visit other parent writing resources:
- Parent Resources by Grade Level
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- Articles that Support Parental Involvement
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