No Tricks, All Treats For Writing At ALES

Trick or Treat season is upon us but there is nothing spooky about a recent project in Meredith Richardson’s fourth grade class.

In Richardson’s class, students are learning about writing centering around text features. This allows students to comprehend grammar, how sentences are formed, and gives them the opportunity to continue practicing the development of their spelling and writing skills.

Student Davin Lynam explains how the project works, “We are doing a Halloween project about identifying text features. In order to do the project, we had to be collaborative communicators and we had to work to find out what to feature by the description.”

The project helps students to develop skills beyond those that might seem obvious from the surface. Richardson is intentionally helping students learn to form their thoughts by identifying, recognizing, and implementing their recently acquired knowledge to the project by bringing the project to life with a fun hands-on activity.

Student Arabella Coyne explains how the project works, “We worked as a team to put the elements of the sentence structure where they were supposed to go. We had another paper, right here” she says motioning to a cut out of an animated Frankenstein’s monster figure, “it would tell us what we had to do for an index and we placed the index on the heart for example.”

Richardson designed this project with the district’s Learner Profile in mind, “Across the district, our aim is to continue helping our students learn in a variety of ways. If you were to pop into a classroom on any given day you would find our staff implementing creative means of teaching going beyond paper and pencil or learning on a computer. Any time we can get hands-on with a physical project and work in the format of a bigger project to apply our learning, it’s a win in my book.”

Richardson continues, “When students have fun in a smaller project like this, they realise without knowing sometimes that they’re becoming Collaborative Communicators. There is a challenge presented to them and they have to work together, pulling their resources to see how they can rise to the occasion to solve it. I want them to learn these skills so that they become second nature in their journey to graduation.”

For this day before Halloween, it is evident for students in Richardon’s class that if there are tricks, they are helping them develop the real treat of education - becoming Lifelong Learners.