Budding Hemingways

One of my goals for my students is to send them to fourth grade able to construct an organized, solid paragraph. We practice paragraph writing two to three days a week for our bell work (work that should be done while the bell is ringing and I am grading homework). I keep my requirements simple: The students should indent; use complete sentences; and include a topic sentence, three specific detail sentences, and an ending sentence. My students can recite the requirements backwards and forwards. We even have hand motions.

Until recently, I'd kept the topics pretty simple. "Write about your favorite sport." "Tell me what you did last weekend." Last week, though, I decided to test their abilities a bit more. We had finished reading a short biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., so I asked them to write a paragraph describing how he fought racism. The results were as I expected: The high students wrote beautiful paragraphs, the low ones copied the back cover, and the medium ones handled the subject succinctly and humorously. Here are a few samples from that last group, spelling errors intact.

MLK they like to fight with the racism. They haves books for people that fight with the racism. MLK talk with 25,000 peoples of the drim for the 4 sons of MLK Jr. live in a ward that not have rasism.

Who knew that MLK was a "they"?

Martin Lauther King was a good minister. He saw the "whites only sign and he was sad. He deases the blacks can go in every where. Some people don't like what Martin said. I like what Martin said at all.

My favorite part of that one is the Englishized version of the Spanish word "say."

MLK fought the racism. He spoke to 250,000 people. He told them that he have a dream, fought racism. He said that all the people is equal. He won the racism.

We really have come a long way; I promise.