By Staff
Patrick Hamilton staff and students have been hard at work since the beginning of our school year.
Teachers are planning and implementing lessons to teach and reinforce concepts from English/language arts in every academic area.
A good foundation in basic reading, writing, spelling and grammar skills is essential to success in school, and ultimately to success in life.
The effort in this area was renewed last August, when several teachers from Dowagiac, Marcellus, Edwardsburg and Niles spent a week with retired Michigan teacher Shirley Poulton, learning ways to teach writing skills.
She presented to teachers a program called the "Six + One Traits of Writing."
She introduced the six traits: sentence fluency; rich, precise word choice; organization; ideas; conventions; and voice.
As teachers learned about the six traits light bulbs began going off around the room!
Finally, an approach that incorporated many methods of teaching writing, and provided a practical teacher's guide to using all of the best parts of power writing, writer's workshop, John Collins' writing types with FCAs and whole language!
On Jan. 10 of this year and again on Feb. 20, Poulton delivered training to interested Dowagiac staff members in two intense evening sessions.
Many Patrick Hamilton staff members attended after hearing about how valuable the summer sessions were.
Now, throughout the building, it is common to see color-coded word walls, placemats and vocabulary lists in classrooms.
Students may be heard creating silly sentences, using odd sounds to represent punctuation or modeling the writing of famous authors whose writing demonstrates the good use of a particular writing technique such as using rich description, personification, hyperbole, "showing and not telling" and various other technical writing skills.
Students are seen to enjoy writing and anticipate the chance to outperform one another in their creative writing attempts.
This concerted effort has been met with such enthusiasm that everyone looks forward to an improvement in the quality of the written word from the hands of our Patrick Hamilton students.