When his teacher on Thursday asked him to write a letter to an American soldier who is deployed overseas, Whittier Elementary School fourth-grader Byron Pelton knew exactly what he wanted to say.
“Dear soldier, Thank you for putting your life in jeopardy to protect us,” the 9-year-old stated in his letter. “I want to be like you some day.”
Byron continued the letter by introducing himself and asking the soldier about his family and his everyday life overseas. Though he had never written such a personal piece of prose before, he said he felt these were the right things to say to a soldier who is stationed far from home.
“…[The soldiers] are protecting us from the war,” Byron said.
To celebrate today’s National Day on Writing, hundreds of elementary, middle and high school students in Frederick County practiced their writing skills by crafting personal letters to American soldiers. And thanks to a special partnership with Fort Detrick, the letters will help morale for deployed soldiers, said Karen McGaha, the school system’s specialist for elementary language arts and social studies.
“We wanted to give our students an authentic writing opportunity,” said McGaha, who organized the initiative.
Recognizing the importance of writing in our daily lives, the National Day on Writing is a national event sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English and recognized in resolutions passed by the U.S. Senate in 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Frederick County Public Schools did not celebrate the event last year, but McGaha didn’t want to miss the opportunity to encourage students to practice their writing, especially in view of the demands of the upcoming Common Core standards in language arts.
The Common Core standards are a nationally coordinated initiative that aims to ensure that students around the country are shooting for the same goals and standards. The initiative will bring changes to the language arts curriculum next year by making it more challenging, said McGaha, who believes the writing exercise today is one of the ways to prepare students for the change.
“In this changing curriculum, there is a heavy focus on writing,” she said.
Abbie Waters, a fourth-grade teacher at Whittier Elementary who is also Byron’s teacher, was very pleased with the writing assignment, which engaged all of her students.
“I could see the students really enjoying this,” she said. “We haven’t written a friendly letter like this year.”
At Whittier Elementary, where 30 percent of the parents are based at Fort Detrick, the writing assignment hit close to home and many students were very familiar with the life of soldiers who are deployed overseas.
In Waters’ classroom, at least two students had parents who are deployed or are waiting to be deployed overseas.
One of the students was Elizabeth Morales, 9, who said that her mom has been serving in Afghanistan for more than a year. Elizabeth said she enjoyed the writing assignment on Thursday, though she said she is normally better in math than writing. And she said the assignment may lead her to write a real letter to her mom.
“I talk to her every day,” said Elizabeth, who said she normally uses the phone or Skype.
“But I have never written her a real letter,” she said. “It is not easy.”
As part of the National Writing Day celebration, Sgt. Aaron Madasz who is stationed at Fort Detrick also came to Whittier Elementary to encourage students and provide them with real life inspiration for their writing assignments.
Madasz said he has been deployed to Iraq twice for at least a year.
While he was overseas he received similar letters from students from across the U.S. and it was something that would keep him going, he said, adding that the letters that students were writing now would do the same for other American soldiers.
“When they receive such letters, it really brightens up their days,” he said.
mraycheva@gazette.net
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