Student Authors Share Expertise

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

I teach all major subjects in a third and fourth grade combined class at a highly diverse progressive school in the East Village of New York City. Approximately 68% of the students receive free lunch as well as a number of other social services and spend the majority of their time within their neighborhoods. Our school is committed to contributing to the community and to developing our students' understanding of the experiences of others as well as their responsibility as members of society. One of our major writing units this year is an "expertise project" in which students write a text on a subject that they know a lot about. The published pieces are produced in picture book form - an experience that allows the students to become authors, following in the footsteps of Ezra Jack Keats, Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, and so many others. Creating their own books fills the students with a great sense of pride and excitement, especially as they are given the opportunity to share their own knowledge about something about which they know a great deal. For some students, this assignment is the first that gives them a true feeling of being a writer. For other students it serves as another experience in a series that shows them they can become an author, an illustrator, a storyteller. In the past, I have witnessed students pulling piles of lined paper together inside covers made of construction paper. In time, these loose pages can tear and wither. My dream for this assignment is to have blank books available for my students to use to publish their pieces. These books will add an air of authenticity and an increased sense of worth to the project. With these resources at their fingertips, my students can become real authors with their words and drawings encased within hard covers designed to preserve their creations. All 21 of my students will participate in this project. For so many of my students, writing is still a world which seems foreign and unattainable to them. To be a "real" writer is an achievement of which many of them could not conceive. By publishing non-fiction pieces on topics of which they are experts my students can catch a glimpse of themselves as authors. If provided with these seemingly simple resources - these blank books of pages for them to fill using high quality arts supplies- that glimpse can become a reality.