IN THE CLASSROOM -- Reading and writing was never this much fun

Danette Goulet

COSTA MESA -- “Ooooh -- that makes sense,” said Yeni Custillo, 6,

flashing a wide grin that was missing two front teeth.

“He is at school,” she said, proudly repeating the answer she had come

up with.

Yeni and a fellow first-grader were rearranging silly sentences so

they would make sense.

It was one of several activities going on in Cara Boyd’s first-grade

class at Wilson Elementary School on Monday morning as part of what she

calls the literacy center.

Each morning, children choose several reading and writing tasks to

work on while Boyd reads with various reading groups. You remember those.

The groups always had names such as the Robins or the Blue Jays. In

Boyd’s class, there were dolphins and seals.

When children were not in reading groups, they had lots of fun work

sheets to choose from.

And so I took a seat in a too-small chair with plans to watch their

progress.

There were sheets with pictures -- of a vet, a net, a pen -- and

students were to write the word beneath. There were sheets that had

pictures with sentences next to them missing that needed to be filled in.

But my plans to simply sit and observe were dashed at the first small

tug on my sleeve.

There always seems to be one picture on those sheets that children

cannot quite make out. This one was the vet.

From there, the line formed. I was spelling words and deciphering

pictures.

Then Xochilt Alvarado approached. Having only been in the class a

short while, she did not yet speak English, and I don’t know Spanish.

In stepped Vianey Gomez, 6. Vianey pulled a chair up next to Xochilt’s

and took charge.

I’m certain between Boyd and Vianey, Xochilt will be fluent in no

time.

Many of the activities also worked on motor skills. One such task had

Alex Perez cutting out letters and pasting them onto another sheet in the

form of words. It was a long process because Alex was inventing side

games, such as cutting out all the letters without cutting the edges of

the paper.

Still other students were copying sentences on an overhead projector

or writing about their weekend in their journals.

I don’t remember learning to read and write being that much fun.

* IN THE CLASSROOM is a weekly feature in which Daily Pilot education

writer Danette Goulet visits a campus within the Newport-Mesa Unified

School District and writes about her experience.