Daniel Weintraub: A fine example of where and how kids learn to write

"We tumbled and played for hours. My hands and feet were wrinkled, like raisins. An adult dolphin let me have a thrilling ride on his back. He skimmed over the rolling waves and then suddenly, went under. Giggling, laughing and occasional chirrups with hints of laughter were heard. We dove back under, like an airplane during turbulence. The females performed a beautiful underwater ballet."

– From a fourth-grade student's essay on what she would do after finding herself at the water's edge.

Elizabeth Nesci has a passion for teaching. She loves the opportunity to help children learn, not only about writing, which is her specialty, but life. Spend a few minutes in her classroom and you can see why.

Nesci teaches fourth grade at Sierra Oaks Elementary in the San Juan Unified School District. California students are near the bottom on nationwide writing tests, but Nesci's students excel.

She contacted me after I wrote a column about the latest disappointing round of writing test scores. Not all California students are struggling, she said. Nesci invited me to her classroom in Fair Oaks to read samples of her students' writing and talk about her teaching methods.

I came away impressed with both.

First, a caveat. Most of Nesci's students come from families with well-educated parents earning a good living. These kids get a lot of support at home. It's not surprising that they do well. But even the Sierra Oaks children from lower-income families are writing at a higher level than their peers elsewhere.

Nesci, tall and wiry with blonde hair that falls straight to her shoulders, is a native New Yorker whose parents were immigrants from Italy. Her father was a tailor and her mother stayed home with the children. Both parents instilled in their kids the value of an education, and Nesci's four brothers are also professionals. After graduating from Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., she taught in that area for several years before moving to Florida and then to California.

At Sierra Oaks, Nesci has split the curriculum with a teaching partner so each can specialize in what they do best. All 68 fourth-graders come to her classroom for reading, writing and social science, while the other teacher works on math and science.

Nesci uses a very structured system closely aligned with the state's challenging academic standards. She divides the year into sections focusing on narrative writing (storytelling), summary and response to literature.

Teaching narrative writing, she typically reads from the first page of a novel the children enjoy. Then she asks them to look for characters, description and setting, and a problem that might form the basis of the book's story.

"I ask them, why do you want to buy this book?" Nesci tells me. "We look for the hook. What got you going in the story?"

For summary writing, the students must read articles and then condense them in their own words. Nesci teaches them to look for the details that seem important and to cross out the details that are not crucial. She shows them how to paraphrase.

Teaching the third skill – response to literature – is tough, she says, because it requires higher-order thinking skills that not every 10-year-old is capable of mastering.

"They have to read it and show they understand it with a quick summary," she says. "Then they respond and connect with the literature. They have to answer the question and prove why they feel that way. It's difficult."

A typical week begins with a writing prompt. On Monday, Nesci gives the students the idea that will be the focus of their writing that week. For example: Imagine you found a magic wand. What would you do with it? By Wednesday she expects them to have completed a draft of their week's writing, and they switch with a partner and edit each other's work. The students look for obvious writing errors and clarity, and evaluate whether their partners' writing addresses the prompt sufficiently.

On Thursday, Nesci focuses on structure and grammar, sometimes pulling examples from her students' papers. On Friday, the final copy is due, and Nesci pulls aside three children at a time, goes over their work and offers last-minute edits, which they can leave on the paper or take home to integrate into a clean copy. Either way, the finished product goes into each student's "book" – a file that by the end of the year is bursting with writing samples.

"They see their writing file fill up and they love it," she says.

As Nesci talks, you can feel the respect and admiration she has for her students and the work they do. In 2001, 67 percent of Sierra Oaks fourth-graders were proficient or better in reading and writing, according to California statewide tests. In 2007, 89 percent of Nesci's students were performing at that level, an extraordinary achievement.

The secret, she says, is to keep them at it.

"To learn to write, you have to write." Every day, if possible. But to write every day you also have to enjoy it. Her students' essays and their test scores suggest that they do.

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Daniel Weintraub, (916) 321-1914. Readers can see his California Insider political blog at CapitolAlert.com