My new hobby

Back in September, flush with back-to-school motivation, I asked Carden's teachers about their lack of a parent volunteer sheet. Didn't they need my help? At third grade, are the students too old to have mommy sit in the back and staple papers while she surreptitiously counts the number of times her child fidgets in his seat?

"Well, what can you do?" they asked.

"Umm, I know a bit about writing," I replied.

Better put, I know someone who knows a lot about how to teach writing to elementary students. My poor mother didn't know she'd gained a long-distance, one-period-a-week student teacher this year: me.

Mom's district has designed an integrated writing program. Starting in kindergarten and building every year, the students learn how to write. Not "capital letter at the beginning and period at the end" writing. I'm talking "genre-specific, fabulous sentence structure, vivid detail, and strong verb" writing. Mom serves on the district writing committee to train teachers. This year they even won an award from the California Department of Education.

Long having since stolen her materials for first grade, I offered to come in to Carden's class and teach descriptive writing. I started in October and have come every week since. We've covered multipart sentences, sensory adjectives, showing instead of telling, similes, alliteration, and onomatopoeia.

Now we're working on a narrative unit, letting the kids put those descriptive techniques to use in their own stories. They've written stories about being stuck on a deserted island, how to remove a stubborn loose tooth, and what to do with a dog that follows you home. The kids really are making progress, a pleasant revelation since I'm only there once a week.

I've learned a few things, myself:

Teaching is dang hard work. It takes me 2 hours at least to prepare my 45-minute lesson. Coming up with assignments for the kids who finish first, while not rushing the slow ones, is tough! And how do you involve the ones who don't like to raise their hand or be called on?

It's so fun to see them "get it." To have a student interrupt me with "Mrs. Crockett, you just used alliteration!" makes my whole day.

Good writing is good writing. Period. The concepts I'm teaching these third graders aren't much different than the concepts I taught college students years ago as a writing tutor.

Most schools don't teach writing, and that's a loss. Carden's teacher has exclaimed many times that my lessons and progressions make perfect sense when you see it done, but you'd never come up with it yourself. Mom's district unexpectedly found that spelling and reading comprehension scores improved as the classes focused more on writing.

Writing teaches you to organize your thoughts. One of my writing teachers used to say "How can I know what I think until I see what I said?"

Where will it go from here? Who knows, but I (and hopefully the students) are having a lot of fun in the meantime.