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Community Corner

Opinion: Teacher Liz Slezak's Tall Tales

Sandy Asper observes Liz Slezak's adorable class write like crazy at Kaiser Elementary School in Costa Mesa.

I recently watched Liz Slezak, a teacher at Newport-Mesa Unified School District's Kaiser Elementary, in action and it was so much fun. Her fourth graders were sitting in groups of five with their cute little faces all turned toward her listening so seriously. Liz is my kind of teacher; not too syrupy, not too sweet, just plain authentically caring about her subject and her students. I would love to be a student in her class (even though it's about 10 students too big with a whopping 34 kids).

The day's lesson was writing (as it has been all year) and using what is basically a combination of the Madeleine Hunter method and the Dr. Bruce Joyce and Dr. Emily Calhoun methods, with a lot of Liz's mother Jan Fisher ( who was coach and staff developer at Kaiser for eight years) thrown in.

Liz first talked about the lesson describing what they were going to do that day. She then reminded them of what they had been doing in the past. She asked the students questions which they answered with alacrity, and then read a story that was written (showed here) and the students graded it on the UCLA scale of 1-6 (6 is the best). They were tough graders!

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And here's the best part, each group of five children who had somehow chosen a leader and seriously discussed what they thought the grade should be. Did it have a main idea? Did it have a plan? Did it have chunk ideas in the paragraph? Did it have digressions? Should it be a 6 or a 3 or a 1?

Are you kidding me? I didn't even know what a "chunk" was, and only had a vague idea of what digression meant. After a few minutes they came to conclusions and shared their grades with the class more eloquently than many writing classes I have had in grad school .

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All year Slezak's class has  written "Tall Tales Fables" and were now doing "Expository Writing" about the San Juan Capistrano Mission and the famous swallows combining writing, reading and social studies.

I love these opening sentences:

  • "Once upon a time a long, long, time ago in the remaining ruins of a small ancient village called San Juan Capistrano was an old beautiful mission." by Maggie, Jonathan, Brooke, and Lance.
  • "One beautiful day in San Juan Capistrano in the 1800's there lived a man named Juan Henry. The swallows that lived in the town were sick of eating seeds. Juan Henry got an idea. He wanted to do an experiment to see if the volcano would turn the seeds into something the swallows could eat."1 year later..." by Rachel, Jennifer, Nathan, Ryan and Sem.
  • "Once a long long time ago in an immense kingdom called San Juan Capistrano..." was the captivating opening sentence of the Fairy Tale by Ruby, Trinity, Cameron and Henry

Their "Expository" writing will be equally great I'm sure. Liz works with her mother who assists her as a colleague, and helps in the classroom one day a week. Liz believes completely in the "Write Like a Reader; Read Like a Writer" mantra and it shows.

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