Class Flow:

Arrive and (optional) share about writing assignments or works in progress.

Movement for writers & timed writing #1 (with opportunities for 1-1 meetings with me)

Craft lessons & Studying Great Writing - using exercises, discussion, videos & games

Rewriting & Editing. Group/Individual Project work (such as National Novel Writing Month, our class ‘zine, writing contest-related work, whatever else emerges from our combined genius)

Crumbs -learn to leave writing crumbs for your next writing time. Assign homework.

Final ten - ten minute timed writing before we leave.

MORE DETAILS :

As a part of each class we will immerse ourselves in great writing, utilizing passages and segments from a multitude of sources. Authors and writers and poets of all walks of life and from all times and all continents and all genders and all colors and all backgrounds will be invited into our classroom via these passages.

It is my hope that students come to befriend some of these writers and come to know them more fully.

Students will have the option of sharing their own work with others, and skillful editing (of one's own and of other students’ work) will be emphasized as this is one of the best ways to learn to write well. How they evaluate other students’ work will be the only thing students are “graded” on- if they desire a grade. If we need to immerse ourselves in a concept for a while, homework will be tailored to the student, and will reflect their emerging skills and experiences in the writing realm. Students will self- evaluate, and set learning goals for themselves. I will meet several times over the course of each semester with each student to go over these elements.

Often, tea and writerly snacks will be served.

Other fun stuff: we will write fan fiction with classic literature, alter poems with blackout ink, co-write stories, discuss the difference between AI writing and human generated writing. We will work to loosen and free our voice, and then work to tighten things up via techniques and writerly magic tricks. We will explore the difference between storying and writing. and students will be helped to view writing as a practice in which they can come to know themselves by tracking how they approach the blank page. Discipline will seep into our bones from showing up at the page again and again.

I want to help young writers understand two things: There is no WRONG way to write, and there are ways to write that make writing come ALIVE so that they, the writer, are excited to inhabit it, and so that their (DR) dear reader will want to return to it.

In November we will all complete the National Novel Writing Month challenge, which can be done in partnership with another student, or on one’s own. A sample of each student’s writing will be collected at the beginning and end of each semester. Stay tuned for more on this.

Requirements to join this class:

A true love of writing, an ability to participate in a classroom setting, a support system that will help the student cultivate and sustain a writing practice, and a desire to learn. Students will come out of the class with a process journal, several finished pieces, thicker writerly skin than that which they started class with, assignments for the summer, a whole new bag of tricks, and a stronger sense of their identity as a writer who knows WHY they write. Scholarship $ is available assuming we have full enrollment of ten writers.

What this class is NOT:

boring, overly focused on spelling, the same each time, for kids whose parents WANT them to want to write, or designed to meet anybody’s Core Standards

(I follow Flow, Delight, Curiosity & the Student).