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Treats that teach

By PAULETTE LASH RITCHIE
Published February 22, 2007

INVERNESS - Those little candy valentine hearts with sayings on them appear to have a use beyond wooing sweethearts or satisfying sugar fixes.

That was illustrated recently when Citrus High School honors English teacher Teresa Alvarado took her sophomores to Inverness Primary School with boxes of the wordy, heart-shaped treats and a third-grade lesson in mind.

She and the high schoolers visited the third-grade classes of Jessica Barkley and Marissa Ball to help the younger children practice building sentences.

Barkley, Ball and Alvarado planned the activity to benefit both groups of students.

"We are teaming up our high school kids with the little ones so we can work on the little ones' writing. To benefit the high schoolers, we're hoping to get them into community service to promote literacy," Alvarado said.

"We're studying sentence structure," Ball said.

Barkley, who co-teaches with Ball, said she thought it was "great that we're using totally different grade levels. We're planning to do several sessions so our kids will learn detail and elaboration and focusing on their writing, and this is a way to give them a little one-on-one. Our children look up to the big kids."

The younger children were paired with the older students and given white sheets of paper and the candy hearts.

Armed with sayings like "Cutie pie," "It's love," Kiss me" and "Fax me," the sophomores helped the third-graders make sentences.

"Get real heart of gold," was one concocted by Ashton Connor, 15, and Erika McCullough, 8, Kimber Seaman, 7, and Jaelyn Lanier, 10.

Ashton encouraged the girls to make longer sentences.

"Why don't we try to make one with more than five," Ashton said.

The girls poked through the hearts in front of them and came up with: "Let's kiss my man sweet talk I hope one day you and me marry me."

Morgan Maynard, 16, worked with Shealyn Bruce, 9, and Jordyn Pleskovich, 9, to string eight candy hearts into a sentence.

They were allowed to add conjunctions, verbs or other parts of speech to make sense of the strung-together sayings.

"My girl, I'm sure it's true love when you smile because you are so fine and perfect so will you marry me."

Shealyn said she thought the activity was fun, but admitted: "It was hard."

A couple of examples from Nathan Walker, 16, and Jordan King, 9, were, "My love call me so fine," and "Smile my love."

After the younger children left for another class, Nick Tarr, 16, said working with the younger students took him back to his own days in elementary school.

"I believe it was a very good idea so young kids would see what high school students are like, and it really brought back a lot of memories for me."

As well as the sentence building went for most of the groups, there was one inherent risk with the whole project, as Trent Shelton, 16, will attest.

"Our kids just ate the candy."

[Last modified February 21, 2007, 20:05:36]