Slice of Life Tuesday: Dispatches from Fifth Grade

Lainie Levin

Aug 2

Every year, I ask my departing fifth graders to share what they've learned about language arts and about themselves throughout our time together.

Every year, I tell them this is the last thing I will remember them by. I only give them two rules: letters need to be written in letter form, and I want them to be written by hand.

Every year, I tell students I don't read their letters right away, but I wait until a day where I particularly feel like I miss them.

Today was that day.

Here's what I love about reading through these letters:

1) The doodles, drawings and decorations - particularly the "trademark" ones certain kids drew all the time.

2) The way each letter encapsulates every one of my kids and their personalities, without fail. Who's inventing their own language? Who constructed their letter via origami? Who wrote four lines and moved on? Who encoded a secret message? If you asked me who it would be before I opened the letters, I still would have been pretty darn accurate.

3) What the kids absorbed from their experience. Whether it was a meaningful quote from The Little Prince, a love for all things reading and writing, the kids were listening, and they were learning. I'm proudest that some of the kids reflected that our time together was safe, protected, a place where they felt the freedom to be a fuller version of themselves. I can't think of a higher goal than that.

In keeping with what I've started in recent years, I'll be writing them all back. Soon, I'll dust off the writing paper and the Flair pens. In the meantime, though, I might just breathe deeply enough that my lungs match the fullness of this here teacher heart.