Last year, I volunteered in my son’s kindergarten classroom teaching kidwriting. I have to admit, I was skeptical about it at first, but by the end of the year, I was a believer. Today, for the first time this schoolyear, I volunteered to help with kidwriting in my son’s first grade classroom.
His teacher asked me to work with two children who needed extra help. The first one couldn’t identify vowel sounds to appropriately guess the letters (i.e. you’re writing the word need. N-eee-d, what letters do you hear?). I was lucky if he’d get the sounds “n” and “d”. There was a word wall list of words that began with “t”. He had a choice of about 8. (which one is the word, “this”?) He had no idea. How do you even help a child with this? I’m a writer and an editor, but I’m not an elementary school teacher. And he kept getting distracted away from what he was doing.
The second kid did better. He knew that he needed to start a sentence with a capital and end with punctuation (after I reminded him, he fixed all the ones he had forgotten), he could get most of the consonant sounds, and from one page to the next, he remembered that I told him “fun” was spelled “fun”, not “fon” and spelled it correctly on the next page. So I could tell there was some learning and recognition going on there.
I talked to the teacher after kidwriting was over to ask her how I could reach #1 and help him learn this stuff. She doesn’t know. Nothing she has tried has worked. And I don’t know the theory behind how to teach a kid phonics and spelling and sentence structure.
I originally volunteered to help out once a week. But there’s only one other parent helper and these kids definitely need all the help they can get. I think of a couple years from now and them either struggling with writing and reading all their life, or me taking another hour or so out of my week to see if I can make a difference.
The importance of writing doesn’t start when your in the business world trying to draft a proposal, or even when you’re in college working on your research paper. It starts when you’re 5 years old, sitting in a little red chair with your pencil poised over the paper.
My “pro bono” work this year will be with two cute little boys who need their very own writing coach. I hope I rise to the occasion. Wish me luck.