Today, the writing assignment was to have the fifth grade class I was in write teacher appreciation letters to a teacher they had had at that school. The teacher said to use the letter form in the Writer's Express Handbook, so prior to letting them get to work, we went over the form in detail - where each part of the letter should be placed, where the commas would go, what would be indented and how much.
Then the kids got started. I was not particularly surprised that many of them didn't follow the form exactly. They were to write a rough draft, I was to edit it, and then they were to write a final copy. What did surprise me is that so many of the students, remember these are fifth graders, didn't know THEIR OWN ADDRESSES. A lot of them wanted to use the school's address, but I told them to use their own. Fortunately, one of the students knew that there was a school directory next to the telephone and quite a few of the students subsequently looked up their own addresses in the directory. There were even a few who couldn't tell me which city they lived in. To be fair, the school does draw students from at least two different cities/towns in the area, but I was completely baffled that students wouldn't know their own addresses.
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