Organizing thoughts

We visited foster children in Thpong District, Kampong Speu Province.  It was the rainy season and there was a light rain in the morning.  We had 2 activities this time: ① practicing brainstorming and organizing thoughts before writing an essay, and ② making a summer greeting card.

First, we started brainstorming as preparation for writing an essay.  At the same time, we also explained that brainstorming is certainly effective for organizing thoughts in a systematic way when solving problems, working on projects, and more.

The theme of the essay was "Things I like."  The reason for this was that most of these foster children here began receiving support just this year, so we wanted to get to know them better, and also because many of them are not used to writing, so we chose an easy theme.

When students start writing impromptu, they often lose consistency in the topic and structure of the essay.  In other educational programs in the past, in other regions, we have seen cases where students go back and forth among topics: talking about family members, then the weather, and then school, and back to family, something like that.

So we asked them to categorize their "things they like" and then break down what they wanted to write about within those categories..., organizing their thoughts in this way.  It seems that they wrote about their favorite animals, favorite foods, favorite subjects, etc.  We won't know the contents until the translation comes out, but we are looking forward to seeing how much detail they provide.