We are going to translate children’s essays from now, but a quick look revealed one tendency. As you can see in the picture, many children seem to connect the sentences with bullet points rather than with paragraphs.
On the day of the activity, when explaining that "the theme of today’s essay is this," our volunteer staffs actually wrote down on the whiteboard (1) your favorite class content, (2) reasons why you like it, (3) your goal of this academic year…etc. This was just to visualize the main points, but it seems that there were many children who composed their writings by answering these questions.
Rather than talking about structure of a composition such as making each paragraph with a cohesive content or something like that, we wanted children to write freely what they came up with the mind even if the content is inconsistent. But it was truly unexpected that they wrote in bullet-points style without connecting sentences. Of course not all children did so, though. After all, we want them to practice connecting sentences and paragraphs into one composition, so we should think how to overcome this point next time.
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