CANBY, Oregon—In the newness of childhood, every scent is intense, every flavor full of meaning. These smells and tastes, along with a collage of images, textures, and sounds, bond to a child's memories of events, becoming an inseparable part of her understanding of the world.
At Cecil Trost Elementary, kids are tapping into this rich panoply of senses with the help of a grammar software program and a caring teacher. Heather Johnson is coaxing pure poetry from her fourth-graders—remarkably, even from the many English-language learners among them. A recent project to create paragraphs about autumn produced this from Geovanni: "Autumn is the best season. I see leaves in the air falling from the tree. I smell maple on trees and on pancakes, too. I hear the wind when I run on the soccer field. I taste hot chocolate in a cup when I drink it. I feel happy when I play and when I play soccer. That's why fall is the best."
How does a teacher get such image-laden prose from young students, especially those who are recent arrivals to the United States? Johnson manages it with the help of a program aptly named Inspiration*. A template called Autumn Sentences, designed by the district for teacher training, guides the children through the nitty-gritty of grammar and sentence structure by drawing upon the sensory information stored in their memory banks. The template shows five graphic icons, each representing one of the five senses. With the template as a guide, Geovanni supplied five nouns that tell something about the season—a smell, a sound, a sight, a feeling, and a taste. From there, the students added descriptive phrases or an adverbial clause to each noun. Finally, they built complete sentences and, ultimately, whole paragraphs.
"The project goal is for students to build complex and interesting sentences using their five senses," Johnson explains. "This mapping software is a powerful tool for teaching skills in many content areas. The graphics and webbing capabilities make it an ideal choice for this lesson."
