HIGHER ED TODAY
COURIER LIFE, A 16 UG. 27-SEPT. 2, 2021
How to improve your
child’s writing skills
BY EMILY LEVY
Some children enjoy spending hours
on end writing paragraphs and stories,
but others absolutely dread it. They
may have great ideas but struggle to
express them on paper. Yet as students
move through school, the writing demands
will only continue to increase.
Help make writing fun for your child
with the ideas detailed below.
Play games!
Playing word games with your child
can help improve spelling, vocabulary,
and overall writing skills. Try playing
the popular game Scrabble, where players
use letters on tiles to form words
that build on each other. Hangman is
another fun game, where one player
thinks of a word and writes a series of
blank spaces on a sheet of paper, each
representing a letter. The other player
must guess the letters one at a time until
they come up with the word (or get
“hanged”). You can play story games
with your child, where you provide
your child with a story that contains
blanks for words that they must fi ll in
or play a dice game like “Roll a Story”
where players roll a series of dice that
each contain a picture and uses their
imagination to write a creative story.
Journaling
Encourage your child to maintain
a journal and write in it daily or almost
daily, and you will likely see a
drastic improvement in her writing
skills. Start by taking your child to a
store and letting her pick out a journal
with cool, colorful patterns that appeal
to her. Then try to do something
interesting each day – whether it’s taking
a trip to the zoo or a park, or simply
discussing a current events topic
or trying a new food for dinner. Then
encourage your child to write about
that topic in her journal. Tell her not to
worry about perfect spelling or organization;
the idea is just to write freely.
Later you can teach her to go back and
self-check her work with an acronym
like COPS, which stands for Capitalization,
Organization, Punctuation,
and Spelling, where she writes a check
box next to each letter in COPS (written
vertically) and checks for each element
in the acronym, one by one. For
starters, though, just have her focus
on writing freely and creatively.
Create a Writing Jar
Create a fun “writing jar” fi lled
with story prompts. To do so, look
through newspapers and magazines
with your child and cut out interesting
pictures of animals, celebrities, or
beautiful vacation spots. You can also
write down phrases on small cards,
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like “If I were an animal, I’d be…”
or “My favorite dessert is…” and put
those cards in the jar. Then have your
child close his eyes, pick a card from
the jar, and use it as a story prompt to
create a writing piece. You may want
to have him self-check his work, just
like with the journal entries, using
COPS as detailed above.
Write Letters
Most of us prefer to text or email
friends and relatives since it seems so
much faster and more effi cient. Yet creating
handwritten letters can improve
writing skills, and it’s exciting for the
recipient to receive an actual letter in
the mail – a real novelty these days.
Purchase colored pens or pencils,
stamps, and stickers for your child,
and have her write a letter to a cousin,
grandparent, aunt, uncle, friend, or
even pen pal, then decorate it with lots
of colors, pictures, and stickers. Make
it a fun, colorful activity and she will
have lots of fun doing it – plus the recipient
will be thrilled to receive it!
Try an App!
We all know that kids love playing
on tablets or computers, so try integrating
writing apps and games to help improve
writing skills. The app Writing
Challenge for Kids includes a variety
of prompts that kids can choose from to
write a creative story. “Book creator”
is a tool that helps students write their
own books using different templates
and designs. “Edublogs” is a great website
that helps your child get into blogging!
Kids can create their own blog
on a topic that interests them and can
share it with others. “Net Rover” is another
website that contains lots of fun
writing games for kids to play.
Writing is a wonderful opportunity
for expression and a key skill that is
critical for school success. Help your
child improve her writing skills while
having fun with these tips, and she
will be well on her way to school success!
Education
For the first time in 17 months, CUNY’s
campuses will be fully open for the start of
the fall semester.
After nearly a year and a half of almost
exclusively remote instruction, I am
pleased to be able to welcome back our
students, faculty and staff to CUNY for a
new academic year that will offer a more
familiar look, both in the classroom and on
campus.
It has been a challenging period, to say
the least, but like the city and state we call
home, our university community is adept
at dealing with adversity. This is reflected
in our theme for the new academic year:
Can’t Stop CUNY.
Approximately 45 percent of the nearly
50,000 course sections across CUNY’s 25 colleges
and campuses this fall will be taught
in a hybrid or in-person format, while some
55 percent will be delivered online.
So much of the CUNY experience revolves
around the sense of belonging and
togetherness we draw from our lives on
campus, and it’s clear from my visits to several
colleges on Aug. 25, the first day of fall
classes, that people are happy to be back
and reconnecting with their classmates
and colleagues after a long time away. For
many of our 260,000 undergraduate and
graduate students, this fall will mark the
first opportunity to participate in campus
life.
At the same time, what is also clear is
that they still have real concerns about the
recent uptick in COVID-19 transmissions
due to the emergence of the Delta variant.
These developments have reignited some of
their anxieties and fears.
I share our students’ excitement and
fully understand their trepidation. It’s
for this reason that I continue to preach
the importance of getting vaccinated and
masking up, since we all know these are
the best tools we have for controlling the
spread of COVID-19. And now, it is more
than a suggestion; it’s mandatory. The full
approval by the FDA for the Pfizer vaccine,
issued on Aug. 23, triggered a 45-day final
deadline for our students to be fully vaccinated,
or they risk being unable to complete
their courses.
For more than a year, the University
has been preparing to welcome students
back to a more in-person fall with a myriad
of safety initiatives. These protective
efforts included requiring that anyone entering
a CUNY facility for any reason will
need to be fully vaccinated, or show proof
of a negative COVID-19 test taken within
the previous seven days. We now have 18
testing sites up and running on campuses
in all five boroughs, as well as two CUNY
Central locations.
We have conducted a rigorous inspection
of ventilation systems and other essential
safety features in the classrooms,
offices, laboratories, libraries and other
spaces that will be in use. The University
has also reviewed and approved comprehensive
reopening plans for each CUNY
campus and Central Office location,
crafted in accordance with city, state and
federal guidance.
I hope these precautions have a reassuring
effect on our students, many of
whom reside in the communities that were
impacted the most by the health and economic
crisis. Their stories of resilience, as
well as their eagerness and concerns surrounding
the fall semester, resonate with
me greatly.
Billing Chen, who won the highly competitive
Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship as a
senior at Queensborough Community College
and used it to transfer to Hunter, is excited
by the opportunity to attend classes
for the first time on the Upper East Side
campus.
“I can’t wait to go back to school in person,
to participate with my classmates and
the professors,” said Chen, who plans to
go to dental school after graduation next
spring.
“Online, if you don’t understand something
it’s kind of hard to type your questions,”
she said. “I also like to have study
groups, two or three of us who can do
homework or study together, and I love to
visit professors in office hours.”
Olawale Oladapo, an engineering student
at Hostos Community College, voiced
sentiments common among many CUNY
students when he described being excited
to be back on campus but also unsure of
what to expect.
“The first day of school is never comfortable
and now adding COVID to it,”
said Oladapo, “I think it will be a new normal.”
The importance of establishing personal
connections cannot be overstated.
I wish all of our students the best of luck
as they forge ahead in their studies, their
lives and in CUNY’s return to our campuses.
It may indeed be a “new normal,”
as Olawale describes it, but our university
community is well prepared to continue
overcoming challenges together, for each
other and for our city.
As I said: Can’t stop CUNY.