Persuasive Writing: A Letter to a Bully

In My Name is Hamburger, ten-year-old Trudie Hamburger is ashamed of her last name. Daniel Reynolds, the class bully, frequently reminds her that it means, “Chopped meat. Something a butcher grinds up.”  

My Name is Hamburger takes place in 1962 in the small southern town of Colburn. As the Jewish child of a German-speaking immigrant, Trudie stands out as different from her peers. When a Korean boy joins her class, she feels guilty, knowing negative attention has been diverted away from her and onto him. Trudie doesn’t like being a bystander any better than being a victim. She doesn’t know what to do.  

Only after a family crisis and the support of friends is Trudie able to stand up for herself.

Something people cook on the fourth of July,”

I answer. “An all-American food!”

Daniel blinks as if he can’t believe

someone like me, with a dad from somewhere else,

knows what Americans eat. But he doesn’t say more

because I got the last word today.

My name is Hamburger. An all-American food.

Writing Prompt: To stop a bully, it helps if both the victim and the bystander speak out. Write a persuasive letter from either the perspective of a person being bullied or a person watching cruel treatment. Express your emotions in the letter. Do you feel anger, fear, or hope that relationships could change? Can you share personal experiences or reasons why bullying behavior hurts all involved? Do you have the courage to try and persuade a bully to rethink his/her behavior?    

Jacqueline Jules

Cooperative Learning with Brave Like My Brother

by Jacqueline Jules

As a teacher, I was thrilled to discover Brave Like My Brother by Marc Tyler Nobleman. This slim title will make a perfect read-aloud and writing model for the upper elementary classroom. Told entirely in letters, Brave Like My Brother depicts a touching relationship between two brothers writing to each other during World War II. Joe’s letters home to younger brother Charlie share a fascinating account of an American soldier’s life abroad. The portrayal of war is neither too sugar coated nor too frightening for upper elementary students. Charlie’s letters to Joe share his struggles with a bully at home in Cleveland. The book’s large font and 100 page text should make it attractive to reluctant readers. 

Letter writing is a wonderful vehicle for sharing information. After reading Brave Like My Brother, students could work in pairs, each one taking on the role of a person separated from a loved one by war or circumstance. The letters could involve research into either a historical era or geographic region. It could be an exciting cooperative project. Here are some suggestions.

Student 1: Write letters to a sister/brother/friend describing your life as you travel to a new country and build a new life.

Student 2: Describe your life at home in response to these letters.

Student 1: Write letters home to a sister/brother/friend while you are at summer camp or on a vacation.

Student 2: Describe your life back home in response to these letters.

Student 1: Write letters to a friend during a move to a state across the country.

Student 2: Respond to the letters with information on how things are going in your friend’s old city.

Student 1: Write letters to a parent/sister/brother who is away on business, deployed, or incarcerated.

Student 2: Respond to the letters, explaining your current life situation.

Student 1: Write letters to a grandparent asking what life was like for them and explaining what your life is like.

Student 2: Write letters answering your grandchild’s questions.

In an age, when most people communicate by email or text rather than speaking on the phone, the ability to express ourselves by means of a letter is more important than ever. A cooperative letter writing exercise will give your students practice in both writing and essential life skills.

www.jacquelinejules.com

Taking Care of the Earth

guest post by Madelyn Rosenberg

Both Earth Day and National Poetry Month fall during April, so it’s a good time to introduce you to Take Care, a rhyming book about taking care of the earth and each other.

I wrote Take Care after watching a series of gut-wrenching events unfold in the news. This particular series of events culminated in the nightclub shooting in Orlando. How can we keep doing this to each other? I thought – and have thought, again, many times since. I have similar thoughts when I see people abusing the planet – when someone throws a cigarette butt out a car window or when they find a whale on a beach in Spain with his stomachfull of plastic.

I react with rage. And sadness. And I try to reassure myself that we can learn to take care of each other and the planet and make things better. Poetry, whether we’re writing it or reading it, can be burn or balm. My book is meant to be a balm, though it’s fueled by burn. It begins:

Take care of the world, of the mountains and trees

Tend to the world, all the bumbles and bees

Color the world, with greens and with blues

Heal up the world with the words that you choose

Following are a few related prompts:

Emotion poems

What makes you angry? What makes you sad? What makes you happy and what makes you heal? All poems convey emotion, and for this writing prompt, we’re going to come at it full throttle. The lesson I try to always teach my kids when it comes to writing is that specifics are important. So urge your class, when they’re writing about a particular emotion, to think really hard about the things that make them feel the way they do. Does their emotion have a color? A temperature? A season? Is it tied to a specific event, like a fight with a friend or the loss of a stuffed animal? (Was anyone else riveted by the search for the rabbit lost on the London Underground?) There are no real rules for this one, but for students who thrive with rules, you can tell them the poem has to be the same number of lines as letters in the type of emotion they’re feeling – or a multiple of that if it’s a short one. Challenge: Can you convey the emotion without mentioning it by name?

A letter to the world

Have the class write a letter to the planet. Maybe it’s an apology note. Maybe it’s a thank you note for a dandelion or a dimpled strawberry or the color green. Again, it’s always great when you can get kids to focus on something specific. Want to get them in the right mood? ? Consider a nature walk around the school for inspiration. Prose or poetry for this one, your pick.

A take-care tree

Ingredients:

A tree branch (a fallen one, please =)

A hole punch

String or yarn

“Leaves” cut from recycled paper. It’s fine if there is printing on one side, as long as the other side is blank. Multiple colors help.

A flower pot

Rocks or newspapers

Place the branch in the flowerpot and use rocks or wadded up newspapers to hold it in place. Have students write their ideas for taking care of the world on the paper leaves. Punch a hole in each leaf and attach it to your branch with the string. Use as a reminder and a classroom decoration for Earth Day, Arbor Day, Tu B’shevat or spring. 

ADAPT IT: If your students do the letters-to-the-world prompt, excerpts on tree leaves also make a nice classroom display.  

BIO: As a journalist, Madelyn Rosenberg spent many years writing about colorful, real-life characters. Now she makes up characters of her own. The author of award-winning books for young people, she lives with her family in Arlington, Va. For more information, visit her web site at madelynrosenberg.com or follow her on twitter at @madrosenberg. And if you try this exercise in your classroom, she’d love to see the results!

I'm Not Taking a Bath

by Laura Gehl

In Peep and Egg’s third adventure, Peep And Egg: I’m Not Taking A Bath, Egg gets muddy playing with the pigs. Peep tries to convince Egg to take a bath…but Egg is not taking a bath. No way, no how!

After you read Peep And Egg: I’m Not Taking A Bath out loud to your class, try these activities to get your students writing.

1. Persuasive Writing

Peep tries to convince Egg to take a bath by suggesting different alternatives, such as going to the river, or the duck pond, or the dog bowl.

Write a letter to Egg. In your letter, try to convince Egg to try something new. It could be anything! Maybe you think Egg should go on a roller coaster. Maybe you think Egg should try your favorite video game. In your letter, give at least three reasons to convince Egg.

2. Excuses, excuses!

Peep gives a lot of reasons why taking a bath is not happening—too wet, too bubbly, too slobbery!

Imagine a family member is telling you to clean your room. Make up a list of excuses to show why you can’t possibly clean your room.

3. Make it fun!

Peep finally convinces Egg to take a bath by making bath time seem like a lot of fun.

Imagine it is your job to take out the trash or sweep the floor, but you don’t want to do it. How could you convince a brother, sister, cousin, or friend to do the job instead, by making the job seem super fun? Think of a game to make taking out the trash or sweeping the floor seem as fun as going to Disneyworld!

http://www.lauragehl.com/

Time Capsules & Letter Writing

by Jacqueline Jules

In Abuela’s Special Letters, the irrepressible Sofia Martinez decides that her whole family, including her cousins and grandmother, should make a time capsule.

 “Why?” Sofia’s youngest cousin asks.

“So we can have fun in the future by looking at our past,” Sofia explains.

Time capsules are a creative way for young writers to capture the present and dream about the future. Read Abuela’s Secret Letters from the Sofia Martinez series with your students. Discuss how each child in the story wrote a one word description of themselves. Sofia called herself “curious.” What word would your students choose to describe themselves and why?    

Ask your students to create a personal time capsule. This could be an end-of-the-year activity in which students reflect on the school year coming to a close and what they hope next year will bring. Time capsules are also a great way to start off in September with students writing down their predictions for the school year. Either way, ask you students to include answers to all or some of the following:

Favorite activity

Favorite food, song, color, TV show, game, etc.

Favorite School Subject

Favorite School Memory

Favorite Family Memory

Hopes for the Future

Three Personal Items & Why They Represent Who I Am Right Now

The Best Thing That Happened This Year

The Worst Thing That Happened This Year

What Makes Me Laugh

What Makes Me Cry

Places I Hope to See One Day

Time capsules can also be used to add writing to your social studies curriculum. Can your class make a time capsule for a historical figure like Benjamin Franklin or George Washington Carver? Could they make a time capsule for the Jamestown colony or Plymouth Rock? Time capsules provide many opportunities for imaginative learning and writing. No time capsule is complete without letters explaining the purpose of the objects included and other background information. Time capsules are also a great discussion starter for why it is important to preserve history. Your students could do research on time capsules and report on their findings. What did city officials bury in the cornerstone of important buildings? Do you agree with their choices? What items would you choose to represent your city?

And once students have finished their time capsules, they will enjoy decorating them. Creative learning is so much fun!

www.jacquelinejules.com

Writing Connections with Science

by Mary Quattlebaum

How to connect writing and science?  Both are important areas for learning for students of all ages.  At the same time that you teach one, you might look for opportunities to reinforce learning in the other.

The website of the publisher of my new nonfiction picture book, Mighty Mole and Super Soil (ages 4-9), features an article with activities related to the book (including making a dirt cake) and Common Core-related projects.

Here are two activities that connect writing with science:

DIRT LETTERS: The United Nations named 2015 the International Year of Soils, in honor of this important resource.  Soil is vital to the health of the planet, but most humans rarely think of it because they can’t see it.

Classroom discussion:  Have students look around the room and out the windows and brainstorm ways that soil is important to life.

Writing:  Young elementary-aged children might choose one of those ways and write and illustrate a letter thanking soil for what it has done/gives and how that particular child has benefitted.  Older children might send their letters to a congressman.

Sharing:  Letters might be posted on a classroom bulletin board, to help celebrate World Soil Day on December 5 (as well as the year-long celebration).   Also the class as a whole might plant a seed or transplant a houseplant into a special pot so that students can feel soil and experience it through many of their senses.  (Chad Wallace brings the underground world to vivid life through his illustrations for Mighty Mole and Super Soil, and students might look at them as they illustrate their letters.)

Playing with Font/Letter Shapes:  Patty Arnold, the book’s designer, worked carefully with the font so that the title and words in the main story look “gritty,” as if they’re fashioned from soil.  As Patty says, the shape and design of the words can help to create a picture and enhance the story.  Students might make some of their words (such as “soil”) look as if they’re made of dirt, perhaps by using a brown crayon when writing that one word.

ARGUE ON PAPER:  Mighty Mole and Super Soil grew out of an ongoing discussion with one of my brothers about moles.  I was Team Mole, appreciating the shy mammal in our backyard.  Moles mix and contribute to healthy soil.  My brother was Team No Mole, irritated by the ridges and molehills in his plush lawn.  He called the mole a pest!  Doing the research to persuade him otherwise gave me the idea to write this book, which I dedicated to him. J

Classroom discussion:  Ask students to list creatures that many people label as pests (specific types of animals or weeds, perhaps).   Why are they considered pests?  What do they do that disturbs humans?

Research and Prep:  Ask students to each choose one of these “pests” and to research its benefits (find at least three).  Then ask them to close their eyes and “become” this pesky animal or plant.  What does it see, hear, smell, taste, and feel?  What is its world like?

Writing:  Continue to pretend to be that pesky animal or plant, and write a letter from it to someone (the world at large, an exterminator, a mole catcher, human parent, etc.) to persuade that person that it is not a pest.  Why should this creature or plant NOT be destroyed or removed?  Have students work in pairs to peer review one another’s work and enhance the persuasiveness.

Share:  Ask for volunteers to share and encourage students to send their letters to the person or to a newspaper editor or organization.

www.maryquattlebaum.com

SUMMER LETTERS AND PICTURE POSTCARDS

by Karen Leggett Abouraya

There was a time before Facebook and Flickr when people mailed picture postcards to friends and family as they traveled on vacation. They were often called “penny postcards” because the stamp cost just a penny. Here is one from Washington, D.C. in which the writer - Celinda, my grandmother - tells of voting and attending a luncheon with other Daughters of the American Revolution from Ohio. You’ll also notice that this 1935 postcard bears an address with just a name and a town!

Why not make this the summer to bring back the pleasure of picture postcards and summer letters? A dear friend of mine who goes to Minnesota to fish every summer often writes four to six page letters by hand; they can’t be read on the fly as we do with emails and Facebook posts. They must be savored, as I visualize the family members or fishing adventures he describes.

Debbie Levy devotes her award-winning book, The Year of Good-Byes: A True Story of Friendship, Family, and Farewells, to the beauty and emotional power of much shorter handwritten notes.  The notes include drawings and poetry in a poesiealbum, or autograph book, kept by Debbie’s mother Jutta during her last year in Germany in 1938. Young readers continue to add their own poetry to Debbie’s Poesiealbum Project.

In Valerie Tripp’s American Girl book, Changes for Kit, Kit Kittredge writes a letter to the editor dictated by her uncle. She disagreed with it so completely that she wrote her own - and the newspaper printed hers! The teachers who developed the website Books Kids Love include a long list of titles perfect for encouraging letter writing.

Letters help us preserve memories, make political statements or just add pleasure to a friend’s day. Encourage students to write and send a picture postcard from wherever they are going this summer - or even from their own hometown.  It is a chance to practice the mechanics of writing an address correctly when it includes more than just a @ and a dot. The space on a postcard is small enough that even reluctant writers might be inspired. A 140-character Tweet would fit just fine!

Encourage students to

•   describe something colorful or interesting in a few carefully chosen words, or

•   tell what they have been doing so that the reader could visualize it, or

•   make a connection with the reader by mentioning something they have in common that relates to the picture or place (hearing a band they both like, seeing a funny dog or cat, flying a kite on the beach), or

•   send postcards to a teacher at school so they can be shared in the fall.

Wishing everyone a lovely summer, filled with books - and letters!

http://childrensbookguild.org/karen-leggett-abouraya

CROSS-COUNTRY TRAVEL IN POSTCARDS

by Jacqueline Jules

Throughout the summer, Pencil Tips bloggers have been suggesting ways to inspire young writers to document their travels. Joan Waites suggested a map collage. Alison Formento provided ideas for listing facts and sharing the information in different ways. I’d like to suggest postcards enhanced by research.

Vera B. William’s classic picture book, Stringbean’s Trip to the Shining Sea, is an illustrated group of postcards written by a boy named Stringbean Coe on a trip from Kansas to California. In each postcard, Stringbean describes his travel experiences in vivid words and pictures. Share this delightful book with your students and ask them to write their own cross-country adventure  in postcards. This is a great opportunity to combine description with geographical research. Students will need to look up important facts about National Parks and other major tourist attractions so they can be accurately portrayed in their writing. Words and pictures can be created on large blank index cards (8 inches by 5 inches) and fastened together with string or a brad on the left hand side. The end result is a postcard book, just like Stringbean’s Trip to the Shining Sea.   

Another fun travel book to use for inspiration is Darcy Pattison’s The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman. In this picture book, a life-sized wooden toy hitchhikes across country while his progress is reported back to his owner through letters and postcards.

Both books depict strong characters and are great models of how a story can be interwoven in a travel narrative. Better yet, they are so much fun to read, your students may suggest writing their own travel letters before you give the class assignment.

www.jacquelinejules.com

DEAR AUTHOR

by Mary Amato

Writing a letter to an author is a wonderful way for a child to connect. What you want, though, is for the child to receive a letter in return. To make sure this happens, you need to have the correct address. Sometimes authors have contact information on their websites. Often this is just an email address. While email can be quick, sending and receiving snail mail can be much more meaningful. Snail mail addresses are harder to find, but there are a few tricks to make the experience more successful.  Here is a info sheet that explains the dos and don'ts for contacting an author. Share this with a child and give it a try.

http://www.maryamato.com/how-to-write-to-an-author

SUMMER SUNSHINE: BIBLIOTHERAPY

by Alison Ashley Formento

Summer vacation is on everyone’s mind and students and teachers are looking forward to fun with family and friends. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for everyone. Victims of recent tornadoes in Oklahoma face a different summer reality. Storms and other traumatic losses are a more regular occurrence, or perhaps it’s how our news cycles are 24/7. Authors receive steady requests to donate books to charity raffles and to help rebuild library and school collections. We readily give our books, knowing that those rebuilding new homes or schools will need books to help with their healing process.

Bibliotherapy involves finding books that will help someone heal from a trauma or gain an understanding of an aspect of their personality or issue that is occurring in their life. According to the ODLIS, Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science, bibliotherapy is traditionally defined as a planned reading program designed to facilitate the recovery of patients suffering from mental illness or emotional disturbance.

SEND A BOOK AND A SMILE: Bibliotheraphy at the classroom level
Every year, teachers and students clean out their classrooms before summer vacation. This year, take that classroom clean-up one step further.

1.     Together, as a classroom, choose an organization you’d like to help, such as the Oklahoma Red Cross, Books for Africa, a local family with a parent serving in the military, or a family shelter in your area.

2.     Choose a classroom book (or books*) that you read aloud and discuss together. *Books might also come from student donations.

3.     Every student writes a short letter about what they enjoyed in this book. Encourage them to write something about their own school experience, too.

4.     Include a happy classroom photo for the children or organization they are writing to in this special care package.

5.     Wrap the book and letters.

6.     Students can draw a small picture on the packing envelope before it is mailed.

7.     Student could bring in a quarter (if possible) to help with mailing costs.

8.     Send some summer sunshine with this book and letter package to help a community in need.

www.alisonashleyformento.com

THANKSGIVING FOOD FIGHT!

by Jacqueline Jules

At Thanksgiving time, many classrooms enjoy persuasive writing. A very popular writing prompt is the DON’T EAT ME letter where students take on the persona of a turkey trying to convince the farmer to spare him from the chopping block. Students have a blast explaining why they are too scrawny or tasteless to eat. Since these pleas are written in letter form to a fictional Farmer Brown, there is an opportunity to review proper letter form in the process.   

A variation on this theme would be to ask students to write dialogues between foods sitting on a Thanksgiving table. Each food could explain why it is important to the holiday meal and/or the favorite of the family sitting down to eat. Descriptions of foods always provide great opportunities to incorporate the five senses. Does the food crunch in your mouth? Does it have a particular texture or taste on your tongue? What does it smell like?

The conversations between the foods could be playful or serious. The cranberry sauce could argue with the green beans over who is the most colorful or nutritious. The turkey could be a big bully who makes the other foods cry until the crescent rolls decide to take a stand. Maybe the pumpkin pie has an argument with the pecan pie and all the foods pick sides. The possibilities for creative dialogue are endless and students may have great fun performing their finished pieces as Reader’s Theater. For tips on giving each character in a conversation a distinctive voice, check out Mary Quattlebaum’s post on Two-Person Dialogue poems.  

  

And of course, don’t miss this opportunity to review grammar rules for writing dialogue. Many students neglect to begin a new indented line for each speaker or put punctuation inside the quotation marks.

Finally, please note that I said students should write dialogues between foods on the Thanksgiving table, rather than traditional Thanksgiving foods. Many first generation immigrant families, like the character of Tuyet, in my Thanksgiving picture book, Duck for Turkey Day, serve a holiday meal native to their birth country rather than turkey and stuffing. Writing about holiday foods from other countries and sharing their descriptions could become a lesson on diversity in your classroom. We need to remember that not everyone celebrates Thanksgiving in the same way and too much emphasis on turkeys can be uncomfortable for some children. On this theme, I wrote a song about foods on the Thanksgiving table that you are welcome to share with your students. This song, “A Holiday for All,” is set to the tune of Shortin’ Bread. Maybe your students will want to create their own lyrics to a familiar tune in honor of Thanksgiving, too.

 www.jacquelinejules.com

WRITING THAT FORGIVES

by Mary Quattlebaum

During this season of peace and good will, I am reminded of the power of words, not just to assert but to connect, not just to hurt but to heal.

Do you ever provide a prompt that evolves into a powerful writing experience for your students—you can tell by that hushed, charged feeling in the room—but for which you never see the pieces?  Sometimes the piece that allows students to move to a new level of awareness, risk, and connection with their writing may well be the one that the teacher does not review.

This exercise was inspired by This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness by acclaimed poet Joyce Sidman.  This is a lovely book to keep in the classroom—or to give as a gift.  The book is divided into two parts.  In the first section a person apologizes to a specific other for a transgression (breaking a glass keepsake, eating all the brownies, saying something unkind); and in the second section, the person addressed has a chance to respond.

*Talk about some of the poems with students, asking them to mention ways in which others were hurt.  Ask them to imagine how the hurt person might react to the poem-apology and then read and discuss the corresponding poem of forgiveness in part two.

*Ask students to close their eyes and think about a time when they hurt someone or something.

*Have them write a letter to the person in which they tell what they did and apologize.  First assure students that this piece of writing will not be looked at by you (teacher) or shared with others.  They might wish to share it with the person to whom it is addressed—but that is up to them.

*On certain days, allow the page to be a safe place for students to write out their feelings and secrets without worries that this will be reviewed or graded. You might set aside a time, perhaps monthly or biweekly, for such writing explorations.

http://www.maryquattlebaum.com/

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