For the second straight year, Radnor Middle School 7th-graders got immersed in writing with Elizabeth Mosier, a published author and long-time educator. Mosier spent seven sessions over three weeks (April 30-May 18) working intensively with the students as part of the “My Life As A Reader: Students’ Journeys Through Books” project, presented by the RMS PTO’s cultural arts committee and underwritten by the Radnor Educational Foundation.

The residency was designed to help students connect the experience of reading to the process of writing by walking them through their own creation of a 250- to 1,000-word narrative essay about books that have shaped them. In response to a series of prompts, students generated lists of ten books. Then, through several graphic mapping exercises inspired by cartoon strips, children’s pictures books, and a graphic novel, students learned to develop and organize these lists to create meaningful narratives.

In a new twist to the program this year, teachers requested that Mosier focus on an additional book that the 7th-graders study in depth: The Call of the Wild. This book was used as the primary text to discuss elements of rising action narrative.

The “My Life As A Reader” project evolved out of beautiful presentations that connect Mosier’s love of reading to her work as a writer, which she offered to RMS students. The teachers have been so enthusiastic about these presentations that they have now become woven into the sixth and seventh grade language arts curricula, with older students often mentoring younger ones as they put together the lists of books that have been most influential in their lives.

All students submitted an essay at the end of the residency. The essays will be compiled into a beautiful book, as they were last year, and this book will be on display in the school library. This year the cultural arts committee will reproduce the book and offer it for purchase by 7th-grade parents.