IRVINE : Fostering Skills the Write Way

As one of the school district’s four writing mentors, Jan Strahl works daily with students who have difficulty with spelling, struggle with punctuation, and sometimes write sentences that could be mistaken for paragraphs.

But Strahl, who teaches fifth grade at Santiago Hills Elementary School in addition to her duties as writing mentor, is not discouraged.

The successes of two students at Santiago Hills are proof that Strahl’s efforts toward making students better writers are working. Stories written by fourth-grader Bryan Zech and fifth-grader Rachel Lev were recently announced as winners in the annual nationwide competition of the Young Writers Contest Foundation, a McLean, Va.-based group that encourages students to improve their communication skills.

Rachel’s short story “The Orphan Wolf” was awarded first place for her grade level and will appear in “Rainbow Collection,” an anthology of winners to be published by Houghton Mifflin and distributed to winning students’ schools. Bryan’s entry, “Bones’ Stolen Bone,” was a semifinalist. Bryan, 10, was also a semifinalist in last year’s contest.

The young writers have benefited from Strahl’s strategy of having students write early and often. Both had Strahl as a teacher in the second grade, when they were encouraged to write every day about whatever interested them.

“It’s important to give students a sense of confidence in what they already know,” Strahl said. “Focusing on the process of writing instead of the product gets them enthusiastic about writing.”

Instead of assigning students a specific topic, Strahl prefers that they work on what interests them most, which she said results in “real writing.”

“Children write naturally when they are allowed to write for a variety of purposes . . . and pull from their own life experiences,” Strahl said.

While the story of a young wolf’s struggle to survive after his mother is killed was not a true-life experience for Rachel, as an animal lover she found the topic easy to write about.

“I like wild animals and nature, and (the story) seemed like it would be a good one,” Rachel said.

Bryan, who entered a story about two youthful sleuths searching for bones stolen from a skeleton, credited Strahl with fostering his interest in writing. His favorite reading subjects--animals, horror and humor--also turned out to be good topics for storytelling, he said.

Irvine was also represented in the contest by two students from Meadow Park School. First-grader Matthew Plum was a semifinalist with a story, “Living Things,” and sixth-grader Devon Nunes was a first-place winner with a poem, “All I See Is a Clock.”