This semester’s new mentors are learning the ropes at Shortridge, and our veterans and new students alike have showed us just how talented they are! SHS students are serving up some great writing and learning a thing or two so far this semester. Here are a few notes from the field:

Emily Kile: “Last week, I continued to work with K— during the ECA tutoring. We finished reading an Edgar Allen Poe story that we started a couple of weeks ago, and she seemed to enjoy it a lot. She also told us that she had taken another short story that we read home with her and had made one of her friends read it so that they could discuss it together and talk about what they thought it meant. I’m so glad to see that she really has been enjoying the reading. Hopefully the work we are doing is helping her understand more of what she is reading–I just think that the language barrier is definitely a challenge for her.

Toni Cook: I had the chance to work with K—, even though we all were in a huge group, she was so sweet. I enjoyed working with her and the group as a whole… K— jumped right into the icebreaker and we explained to them what an icebreaker was… I wish I was around for the prompt to hear what K— came up with!

Derrick Brown: Yesterday, I worked with V— during tutoring and M— during Exclusive Ink. Various and I read a fairly challenging book about Pistol Pete Maravich. During our reading we talked about Beth’s iceberg activity and what the text was explicitly saying about Pistol and his father and what their actions were implying. I feel that we made a good amount of progress in looking deeper into a text and characters, something that V— said he had not previously done much at all when reading on his own.

Kelsey Schmoe: Last Thursday, I worked with K—. This was my first time working with her. She is incredibly bright and outgoing. K— is very creative and really wanted to draw out her characters before writing the prompt. It would be a good idea in the future (for creative students) to draw out characters before writing about them. This really gave K— a lot of ideas for the prompt!

Compiled by Kate Newman