What are Suffixes?
Are you a passionate educator? Do you love helping kids understand suffixes? Join our team and become a Braintrust tutor today! Suffixes are word parts that are added to the end of a root word to change its meaning. Knowing what suffixes mean can help students make sense of unknown words they come across. Spelling […]
Developmental Milestones of Young Writers
As with any big skill, children learn how to write in stages. Some parents are surprised when they hear that their kindergartner’s incomprehensible scribbles are age appropriate. Others may balk at a teacher’s suggestion that their high schooler’s writing, which seems eloquent, is underdeveloped. The evolution of a writer’s development is complex. But students generally […]
Research Skills for College
There are a number of skills students should master by the time they start making the transition to college. A big one is how to conduct research for the inevitable amounts they’ll have to do over their next four years! A student’s experience with research typically starts in middle school, perhaps with a Wikipedia article […]
Teaching Kids to Evaluate Sources
Before the age of technology, conducting research was both less convenient and a lot more straight-forward. Students would have to go to a library, look through the catalog of books organized using the Dewey Decimal System, and then locate their book on one of hundreds of shelves. There was little room for unreliable sources. And […]
Research 101
Many students struggle with knowing how to begin the research process. They might have a topic, but don’t know where to begin finding the information that will help them create a product to demonstrate their learning. While there isn’t exactly a formula for conducting research, there are a number of strategies that can help students […]
Is it Writer’s Block or Something More?
It can be hard to know how to help students who feel “stuck” in their writing. As students progress through the grades, writing demands grow more and more challenging. Many students are able to keep up, whether with or without extra supports, like sentence starters. But sometimes students who have been doing just fine so […]
Using Sentence Frames and Starters
Writing can be a science and also an art. There are rules to writing, and some aspects can almost become too formulaic. But it’s also very easy for kids to be turned off to the open-ended nature of writing. As they begin learning how to write, it’s difficult to balance the rules and conventions with […]
Tips for Building a Budding Writer
Writing can be a science and also an art. There are rules to writing, and some aspects can almost become too formulaic. But it’s also very easy for kids to be turned off to the open-ended nature of writing. As they begin learning how to write, it’s difficult to balance the rules and conventions with […]
The Developmental Stages of a Young Writer
All young learners go through stages of writing development. As their reading skills emerge, they begin to acquire related skills in writing. These stages may look slightly different depending on the approach to writing instruction that is being used. Not all students go through each stage at the same time or pace, but all writers […]
What is Syntactic Awareness?
There are virtually unlimited ways a writer can phrase a sentence. Sentences can be written in an almost limitless number of ways. A writer has boundless options for how they can communicate the same idea. See what we mean? All of the sentences above provide the reader with the same message, but the syntax of […]
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