Creative Writing!

I love it when teachers are inventive and relevant at the same time, which rarely happens. I've started filling in for the aide on maternity leave and one of the classes she helps with is a reading class made exclusively for 7th graders who failed that portion of the SOLs. It's one of those classes in which the instructor has a script, and because it is very prescribed, it is often very boring to the students, thus they don't learn, thus they fail the test again, and therefore the class has no purpose and educators are forced to repeat cycles that have failed several times over because reform comes at a snail's pace. However, the few times I have observed this class, I was intrigued by it, as were most of the students. Today the instructor admitted to me after class that she often strays from the script.

Hence how she was able to bring in a guest speaker to talk about forensics. This was extremely interesting to the students and relevant as well, since the next few articles they read from their textbooks deal with this subject. The guest speaker made forensics more visual, more life-like, and, what is necessary to yet often missing from education, more applicable to the real world.

Anyway, to the butt of this post. The students read a very short blurb in their textbooks every day and prior to the reading, the teacher goes over relevant vocabulary. Today she reviewed the vocabulary and after talking about it with her students, instructed them to write a short story about anything they wished using at least three of these vocab words. Those students who wanted to share did so, and Ms. K. pointed out that from the context of the stories, it's clear that these students know what the words mean. Talk about a fun way to make learning relevant to everyday life. And in this case, she is teaching reading strategies (which most of these students clearly lack) without saying in that boring old way, "This is how you can tell what a word means." Hooray creative writing! Learning can be fun!