And The Mentoring Begins!

The last few weeks have been an interesting experience mentoring students at Hawthrone Public School in Ottawa. It had definitely been a while since I had read grade 8 writing, and wow was I shocked! It’s an interesting experience for many reasons; for one thing I don’t think anyone was really sure what to expect. All we were told was we would be working with grade 8 gifted students, hopefully working on the students writing process. Secondly, I had never worked with gifted students. The anxiety was a tad overwhelming, on both my part and my students. But once we got started, I realized that mentoring and being in a classroom was much better than being at the university. 

Our first meet started with trying to get to know each other. I wanted to know what motivated my student, what he thought about his own writing, and what he wanted to work on. He showed me an essay he had recently written and we discussed his writing style and preferences when it came to choosing his writing assignments. The period went by much faster than we anticipated, but I was glad we spent most of the time talking and getting to know each other. Although the meet was short, we were able to set some goals for the following weeks and outlined the areas of both strength and areas of improvements. My student decided he wanted to work on perspective, paragraph transition, and overall flow throughout his writing.  

The following weeks of mentoring consisted of continuing to get to know each other and working  on some writing assignments. My student decided he wanted to work on scene summaries for A Midsummers Nights Dream. We started the process by getting him to write his summaries. We used summary examples to try to compare his writing to others, and worked together to edit his writing. The key to improving his writing is not only to edit his work, but also be able to recognize the changes he is making.

Mentoring has been about a month of work in progress, next week will be our last week with the students. Stay tuned to see the comparison of where we started and where we are finishing!