Friday Reflections

A little reflection about what I have learned about writing this year. Looking back, I can see that my high school English teachers were slaves to the five paragraph essay. I don’t remember any of them explaining about how the five paragraph essay is a universal way to organize and develop ideas. I don’t recall any of them saying “Think about the person reading your writing” or “Help the reader out by paragraphing.”  I actually don’t think they ever brought up the idea of “the reader” – the person/s who needed to make sense of my writing.  I struggled learning the writing concepts of organization and development.  I also remember struggling with creating a good topic sentence – a sentence broad enough to encapsulate the ideas contained within a given paragraph.  And, when I was off to college and cranking out research papers – I struggled even more putting together a coherent paper.  I’m sure some of you can relate. You’re thinking - So what?  Well…what...

Here’s an idea -  Mother’s Day comes in this final month and all of us can conjure up how our students might write a message to probably the most important audience in their live – their Mom. I think most kids can hang their writing hats on the following idea. The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown could be used as a mentor text to show students how authors like Brown developed a message and to create a written Mother’s Day message for their own mothers.   Brown selects several mundane important things/events and builds the case for why each is important.  She opens giving a strong reason explaining why the thing/event is important. She continues building a case for its importance with several other reasons.  And she ends each description with the same sentence as the first.    Listen to the oral reading , and you will see and hear the effectiveness of the message that is set in a poetic rhythm. I have given you a verse using Margaret Wise Brown...