Teaching the art of writing

Christine Carrillo

Holding a card with the word “our” written in puffy paint on it,

Susan Thompson asked her first-grade students to tell her what word

it was -- a perplexing question for the 20 students sitting on the

floor around her.

As some students shouted out their answers and others waited

patiently with their hand in the air, the perplexing problem

surfaced.

The 6- and 7-year-old students confused “our” with “are,” which is

an error that often slips into the writings of persons at nearly any

age.

The students were not discouraged. They kept reading the expert

words in their teacher’s book and continued with the new Nancy Fetzer

writing program that was instituted at Ralph E. Hawes Elementary

School in Huntington Beach last October.

Using “recipe cards,” which contain examples of nouns, verbs and

prepositions, and “power writing notebooks,” they each tried to build

sentences that contained a subject, predicate, time and place.

“We’re trying to get them to write one powerful sentence,”

Thompson said. “They’re really learning how to write more

spectacularly. They’re learning how to write more flowery.”

The idea of the writing program is to provide students with a

strong grasp of the basics of writing so that subsequent teachers can

simply build upon their students’ knowledge year after year.

And do so in a way that best suits them.

“It’s real friendly,” she said. “It’s teacher friendly and student

friendly.”

Learning to start each sentence with a green light, which connotes

a capital letter, and end with a red light or punctuation mark,

students quickly learn about the mechanics of a sentence without

having to deal too much with the grammatical jargon that will

eventually seep into their English lesson plans.

Creating sentences like, “A bird is running at the gas station at

night,” the students had to work together in a Mad Lib-type format to

create the “powerful sentences” the program aims to teach.

After warming up with the group activities the students were then

told to go to their notebooks and come up with a sentence of their

own along with a colorful illustration.

But there was one more thing they had to remember about writing,

and Thompson was sure to ask her students what it was.

“You need to check if you have any mistakes and then you have to

go to Miss Thompson,” 6-year-old Nicole Jenkins said.

Even these first-graders know that writing requires editing.

* CHRISTINE CARRILLO is a news assistant with Times Community

News. She can be reached at (714) 965-7177 or by e-mail at

christine.carrillo@latimes.com.