For the Love of Writing: Build a Foundation of Skill and Confidence

Description

In each class of these upbeat, fun, and creative classes, learners will work on sentence construction, sentence combining, syntax (putting grammar knowledge to work), and developing a piece of writing at the elementary school level. They will learn elements of various genres as they write short pieces of writing each week, including essays, summaries, narratives, memoirs, descriptive pieces, biographies, fables, and poetry. This helps them understand how to write differently for various purposes and audiences. Class time will be devoted to direct, explicit instruction in grammar and writing, which includes teacher modeling, guided practice, and students’ independent writing. Students will enjoy each writing task, learning more about various genres, and how to construct sentences and paragraphs with variety, powerful words, and personality. Reading passages are integrated as we look at examples. These classes double as reading classes as they view example pieces of writing, learning about various genres and their component parts.

**Students will type in a textbox to turn in their writing. It is perfectly fine for a parent to type it up! They can also upload a picture of their hand-written work. Students finish their piece of writing after class and submit it. The price of this class includes teacher feedback throughout the week on student writing.**

COURSE CURRICULUM:

This course can be used as an entire year of writing if you’d like. You can pop in and out as your schedule allows because this is a weekly subscription course.

• The How-to Piece. This is a technical piece of writing that forces writers to break down a simple process into its component parts. It takes some thinking and then organizing before they put their pens to paper. Just a heads-up to parents–this class will make your learners hungry! 🙂
• The Informational Piece. A building block of upper elementary and middle school writing in the informational piece! Scholars will write about their favorite person while learning to use elaboration techniques, descriptive writing, and more.
• The Simple Summary. Is this a literature lesson or a writing lesson? It’s both! Students will learn two different types of narratives, and observe important characters, places, and objects, all in preparation for writing a simple summary. This requires analysis and writing skills.
• Descriptive Writing: an Object. Students will learn all sorts of things and it will be so super great. They’ll do awesome work. Ack! What did I just write? General, no-good words! Learners will understand why specific, clear, and strong language is important as they practice writing descriptively so that their readers develop a sharp, detailed picture in their minds.
• Descriptive Writing: Developing a Setting. These are not your average, everyday, boring places. The settings our writers will describe are unusual and other-worldly. They will have to use their descriptive writing tools to paint these word pictures!
• Descriptive Writing: Developing a Character. It’s alive! Students will turn inanimate objects into walking, talking, and maybe even flying characters with detailed external and internal traits. They are authors creating their own unique characters.
• Descriptive Writing: Feelings. It’s hard to describe a feeling! But students will do it! They will write short passages using descriptive writing to SHOW a character with a feeling rather than just TELL us what a character is feeling.
• The Problem Story: a Focus on Conflict. We do not live in a perfect world, with perfect people, with perfect lives! The human story is one of conflict. In this lesson, learners will analyze the conflict in a Pixar Short, which takes some critical thinking. The conflict is not so easy to discern without looking a little deeper. They will use this lesson to create a conflict between two characters. They can be characters they have developed on their own, or they can use well-known characters but in a different conflict.
• The Problem Story: Blend, Baby, Blend. The grammar and punctuation of using dialogue is tricky! But using dialogue in a narrative is a lot more than just what people say! Students learn to give their characters voices by writing dialogue while blending other important narrative elements. They learn to BLEND, BABY, BLEND!
• The Memory Story: a Personal Narrative. Learners should come to class with a very special object for show-and-tell. The object should be meaningful and be associated with a memory. If they forget to bring one, they will be able to run off from class and grab something. It usually just takes a few seconds. This will be the inspiration for writing a memoir, or the “memory story” we’re calling it at this age. In class, we will read an example memoir for even more inspiration.
• The Biographical Sketch. This mini-biography will bring our little writers closer to someone they know. They will learn about a favorite adult through an interview, then they will write the true story about that life. Of course, this will come after they read a sample biographical sketch!
• The Fable. We all know those memorable characters we meet in fables. Fables are different from other stories, and that’s not just because they teach a moral. They are written with certain characteristics. Our scholars will read fables to understand the genre, then they will write their own!
• The “If I Were…” Poem. Just like artists use tracing paper to learn different strokes and artistic techniques, authors can mimic beloved poetry to learn the poetic elements and to stretch their creative muscles. Writers will write the “If I Were…” poem this week. I will warn you though. This lesson, along with the next one, has been known to develop passionate poets! You have been warned.
• The “New Animal” Poem. Again, poetry does not have to be scary! It’s fun to bend language, learn to rhyme, and develop and maintain a rhythm. Again, lifelong poets are born in this lesson.
• The Pet Essay. Do you have ferrets? Parakeets? A pet stuffy? Students will learn the aspects of expository writing as they write a three-paragraph essay on what it’s like to own a pet. They will especially learn to organize and how to elaborate. No easy tasks! But, they will do it and do it well!
• The Elevator Summary. This class is a combo of literary analysis, critical thinking, and writing. After learning about the important plot elements in a story, students analyze Pixar Shorts, analyzing them for exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, and resolution. Then they use those plot elements to write what we call an “elevator summary.” You only have the time it takes to ride from the 1st to the 2nd floor of an elevator to summarize all those important parts. Students learn to be concise!
• The TEE-it UP Opinion Piece. Using fairy tales and fables, students learn to discern an issue, what side of the issue is presented in the literature, and then respond to that literature with their own opinion. Opinion writing is a type of argument writing and this lesson starts to build a foundation of writing and supporting arguments.
• The Literary Analysis Argument Piece. Easy as A-B-C. Here we go! We are working on argument writing and how to support arguments with details from narratives.
• The Sea of Monsters. Students write a hero’s story in the form of Greek mythology! Their hero must navigate through the Strait of Mesinna and fight Scylla and Charybdis to escape and find a way home! This is a three-part unit.
• The Gift of Poetry. It’s all about the verbs in this poetry lesson. We won’t rhyme, but we’ll segment poetic parts and create a couple of poems that can be given as gifts. Parents might want to wait to watch this recording for a couple of weeks. 😉

**The classes restart**