Jimmy Diaz and I have been working together for about three months. We usually meet on Tuesday nights at 6:00, but a few weeks ago I ran into a friend of mine on the way to the Library. He had to go to work and handed me a pair of Giants tickets. I knew Jimmy liked baseball and I couldn't let the tickets go to waste, so I decided we would have our tutor/learner session at the ballpark.
On the way there, we agreed to make it a "working" field trip. Jimmy and I took turns making notes and eating pizza, and I gave Jimmy his assignment for the next week: write a story about the game. I told him about the five "W's" of journalism- who, what, where, when, and why, and turned him loose. The results, I must say, were as inspiring as the Giants hard-fought victory that night.
We had been working a lot on phonics and sounding out words. We had also talked a lot about putting sentences together and good punctuation. In his first draft, whenever Jimmy did not know how to spell a word, he wrote it out phonetically and circled it, so we could work on it later. Sometimes he wrote the word he was thinking of in Spanish, so he would not lose the thought. When we met, we went to the dictionary a lot (Jimmy brings his own) and talked not only about how to spell the word, but also about what the word means: its definition.
A few times the sentences were too long, so we broke them up and made simple statements. Sometimes one sentence naturally led to another, so we put them together with a comma. I want to emphasize that before we did any editing at all, I was very impressed. Jimmy painted a beautiful picture of a beautiful evening. The sights, sounds, and smells of the ballpark and the story of the game came across very clearly in the first draft.
But Jimmy came to Project Read to improve his reading and writing skills, so we made that first draft our workshop. We talked about phonics and got the spelling right. We talked about sound patterns and sight words. We put similar sentences together and made paragraphs. We put down in words what we experienced. Jimmy's writing and recollections of that night are now a living record. Hopefully, there will be many more to come.
-Mark Rowe
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