SeDoMoCha seventh-graders attend Camp Grammar Slamma

By Stuart Hedstrom 
Staff Writer

    DOVER-FOXCROFT — From Oct. 15-18 grade 7 students at SeDoMoCha Middle School spent the first hour of each school day learning how to be become better writers, by taking part in four different classes under a program called Camp Grammar Slamma.

    Math teacher Nichole Martin said she and her colleagues noticed some consistent grammatical mistakes in students’ writings earlier in the year and they soon met to determine a way to address what they were seeing. “We wondered what would be the things that would be most helpful to look at in their writings,” Martin said.
    The four teachers settled on four main topics, and devised a summer camp theme to make the lessons and accompanying exercises more fun for their pupils. “They see each of us once, whatever their first period is,” Martin said.
    She said her session of Camp Grammar Slamma focuses on constructed responses, while English/language arts teacher Amy Fagan-Cannon worked with capitalization, science teacher Mary Povak instructed on homonyms and social studies teacher helped students with sentence structure. A log positioned against a hallway wall was decorated with arrows pointing to the various classes, such as “open season on homonyms” and “something to write home about,” “lowercase ‘i’ and other things that hurt.”
    On the morning of Oct. 16 the seventh-graders all gathered in Povak’s classroom to start the day’s camp activities. Carroll, who was standing next to a replica campfire with orange and yellow construction paper flames atop firewood and rocks, led the students in an opening song before they divided up into their four sections.
    “We are learning about constructed responses, they are an answer to a question in paragraph form,” seventh-grader Michaelb Niles said about Martin’s section of Camp Grammar Slamma.
    “We have to read a passage and then make a constructed response,” Jordan Patton said.
    The seventh-graders in Martin’s Oct. 16 class took turns reading a story about an innkeeper. When they finished Martin asked them to explain what the innkeeper learned from his experiences, using examples from the text, by writing a paragraph or a constructed response.
    With most the pupils typing on their laptops, they spent the remaining 25 minutes drafting their constructed responses. Martin advised the students not to use the words “I” and “you,” as  “We don’t need to be in the paper.”
    “The first step is to start general and then answer the question,” she said. Before being dismissed several students shared their opening sentences, with one being “The innkeeper learned a lot from his experiences.” The sentence provided the student with a lead they could then expand upon with several examples following in the paragraph.
    In Povak’s classroom, renamed as “Cabin 106” instead of room 106, she told her students for the day, “We are going to work on choosing the right words.” She explained that spell check may help the students in this area of their writings, but the program does not point out if the wrong word was used such as there, their and they’re.
    Povak said she has seen examples of the wrong word being used by adults, such as in Facebook postings, e-mails and blog writings. She said sometimes it can be difficult to take the writer or poster seriously when they make such mistakes.
    “The ‘trickiest tricksters’, these are the ones I see the most in your writing,” Povak said. She said in addition to there, their and they’re she has noticed our and are misused as well as witch and which. The students then came up with some of their own examples to keep in mind when writing in the future.
    “Does it make sense to your reader, that is why it’s important to use the correct word,” she said.
    “It’s more fun than learning regularly, we’re not just sitting there and taking notes,” Bella Santagata said about Camp Grammar Slamma.
    Speaking about the day’s session on getting into sentence structure, Jacob Diamond said, “Mr. Carroll’s is the waterfront, he said we are going to learn how to swim in the deep end without a life jacket.”
    After the conclusion of the four days of camp, a final celebration was scheduled for the afternoon of Oct. 18. “The students don’t know this but we are going to have S’mores at the end,” Martin said. “It’s a little reward for their hard work.”