We Need The Mayor's Help!

As the first step of our action plan, my students began to draft letters to Mayor Cory Booker about the issue of Newark being a food desert. I used my morning message to model a letter to Mayor Book addressing the issue.

This is a picture of my morning message. I used this to get my students thinking about how they would start writing their own letters.

My students and I talked for a bit about why it was so important that we reach out to the Mayor. I wanted to make sure my students understood why they were writing letters to him. "The mayor is in charge of all the people", said one student. I asked, "In charge of all the people where?" "In Newark", he responded. I asked, "What else is the Mayor in charge of, the people and...". "Like if we can do stuff! Like if we can build a new place. He's going to say yes or no right", asked another student. "That's right. After we write these letters and he reads them, he can then decide if our idea is good or not", I replied. "Ms. Stewart why would he say no? Don't he want the people healthy. He don't want the people to get obese right", asked another student. The conversation continued on for a few minutes, but by the end my students understood that the Mayor may not approve their idea, but they were very optimistic that he would! I explained to them that when writing a letter it is important to keep the letter short and to the point, so I gave them 5 main points to hit. I was afraid of them going off topic and making their letters too long, so I told them as long as they included everything I asked of them, they only had to write 5 sentences. I also explained that they needed to be 5 perfect sentences because we want to show the Mayor what smart first graders we are!

My students were to use their opening sentence to state the problem. I knew they were all going to write that Newark was a food desert, so in their second sentence they needed to define what a food desert was. Then they had to give a reason why Newark needs to get healthy, followed by what it is that they want the Mayor's help building. I then wanted them to close their letter with "Please help us fight the food desert" and sign their name.

I was pleased with how well they did with the first draft of their letters. Due to the fact that I have some students who breeze through writing and others who struggle, we decided to work on these all week so everyone could go at their own pace. We are going to finalize them in the next day or so. I was encouraged to not only mail them out, but to post the pictures on both Mayor Booker's Facebook and Twitter account. If I individually post all the letters on both accounts, that's 40 posts and he is bound to give some sort of immediate response! I am anxiously awaiting that process.

I apologize for this picture being sideways; I was unable to format it. This is an example of one of my student's letter to Mayor Booker.