`Have you ever seen one shoe in the middle of a road? Well,I've seen a lot of them. They're so desolate and lonely looking, Isometimes wonder how they got there."
So begins Matt Modica's discourse on "The Lonely Shoes," one ofthe winners of a national writing contest for elementary schoolchildren.
In his short piece, the budding Lake Villa writer speculatesabout where the shoes come from. Perhaps a kangaroo lost oneescaping from the zoo, thinks Modica. Or maybe "the colonel" lost ashoe chasing a chicken to use as the basis of his special recipe, orCinderella shed one her prince didn't find. "Or perhaps, it couldhave just been a lonely boy who ran away, with a shoe that was solonely it ran away."
The 11-year-old Modica, from the far northern suburbs, is one of13 Chicago area schoolchildren honored in this year's Young WritersContest. The national competition seeks to promote the proper andcreative use of language through writing.
The area winners will make up a hefty contingent of the 105children whose poems, essays and short stories were chosen from among5,000 entries from across the country. They will be published in ananthology called Rainbow Collection: Stories and Poetry by YoungPeople ($6, Young Writers Contest Foundation), to be published thisMay, with funding from Ronald McDonald Children's Charities.
Musical Notes
Musical notes are acrobats.
They work with things like sharps and flats.
They jump and shake. They whisper and shout.
Musical notes run all about.
They rest on lines and hang in spaces
The people who play them are finger aces.
Notes are great. There's no denial.
See those instruments boogie with style.
Joel Carrera
Eleven of the winners are from Chicago public schools:
Isabelle Becerril, 13, and Carrera, 12, both of HawthorneScholastic Academy; Linda Daitsman, 9, Sayre Language Academy;Dennis Diamantopoulos, 13, Dewitt Clinton School; Wendy Farfan, 13,Ninos Heros School.
Also, Jane Kulbida, 13, and Carrie Simon, 8, both of John KinzieSchool; Francoise McGinnis, 13, La Salle Language Academy;Jacqueline Ravnic, 8, Mark Sheridan Academy; Alfredo Rivas, 7,Schubert School; Ieachea Troupe, 9, Randolph School.
Two winners were suburban students - Modica, from theIntermediate School, Lake Villa, and Stephanie Foerster, 13,Barrington Middle School. Jenna Wright, 10, of Riverview School inDownstate East Peoria, also won.
A Sheriff
A sheriff wears a badge of gold
And travels streets new and old.
She catches outlaws on the street
And protects you from evil that you meet.
She rarely rides a horse these days
But travels in more modern ways.
She drives a new Oldsmobile
And locks up people who try to steal.
Jacqueline Ravnic
The local youngsters' success in the three-year-old nationalcontest indicates that a renewed emphasis on writing in Chicago areaschools may be paying off. Many - but not all - are in programs forgifted students.
Some of the teachers who submitted the winning entries saidthat recently they have been stressing both the fundamentals ofwriting and the satisfactions of the creative process.
"Writing is a hot topic right now," said Monica Sullivan, areading resources teacher at Hawthorne Academy on the North Side."People in education are talking about it, and we put a lot ofemphasis on it in this school. In class, we do a lot ofbrainstorming, talking about it. What makes something sound good?What really hangs together? After all, these kids will need to knowhow to write for the rest of their lives."
"There is a definite upswing in the last several years, with themovement back to the basics, to the process of writing," said DarleneWebb, English department coordinator and Stephanie Foerster's teacherat the Barrington Middle School. "Not only are we doing a lot ofwriting, but we're starting to see better work now than ever before.
"So the basics are paying off."
from "Spring Lake"
I looked out over the water. The ripples in the water ran awayfrom our canoe, slowing down to small swells. My gaze drifted to thefar banks on my right. The thick forest could be seen just past theweeping willows. The sad trees let their branches slide along thewater.
Stephanie Foerster
"If you can't communicate your ideas, it's not too important tohave them," said Betsy Foxwell, Dennis Diamantopoulos's teacher atClinton School. "I try to encourage my students to get out of theirown teenage world, to see how they fit into the spectrum of man onEarth, those who came before them, those who will come after them.My whole purpose is to teach them to think, and then to communicatewhat they think."
Diamantopoulos said Foxwell encourages the class to write.
"I guess poetry is one of the best things I do, but I never won acontest before," he said. "When I wrote the poem I knew there wassomething special about it, but I didn't know it would win. I wassurprised."
The typical process teachers reported was working with studentson ideas for the contest entries first, fleshing them out and thengoing back and using some of the grammatical and spelling errors inthe rough drafts to refresh students' memories on the correct formsthey had learned.
By the time the entries were submitted, most errors had beeneliminated by this process. However, teachers had to sign a formcertifying that, as far as they knew, the pieces were students'original work.
A Poem About Me
Always has a messy room
Loves my mom
Feels swimming is good
Reads a book when I should be sleeping
Eighth is my next birthday
Dark eyes and hair
Once in awhile wants a dog
Alfredo Rivas
Carrie Simon, who wrote a story called "Bill the Buffalo and HisLong Day," said she likes to read, all kinds of books, and to write."I write my ideas down at school and then I write them at home," shesaid.
Carrera's teacher, Monica Sullivan, "thought up the idea ofwriting poems," and then taught the class how to do it, he reported.When he grows up, Carrera would like to be either an author or ascientist. "I don't like math," he said.
Ieachea Troupe's essay has to do with "how the Indians helped thepilgrims plant stuff" and culminates with the first Thanksgiving.
Writing isn't always so easy for Troupe, especially plottingher stories, she said: "It's difficult to tell about how they didit."
Technical considerations aside, the kids just like to expressthemselves.
Or, as Francoise McGinnis put it in her poem, "The LivingPicture":
To create -
A God-given right.
To express
An inner bright light.
A line or two,
Just like so -
An artist's way to let himself go.
Purples and oranges, a brilliant blue,
Beauty in ugliness -
A fresh point of view.
No comments:
Post a Comment