Writing+Academy+2010

The Dade Association of Academic Non-Public Schools holds a workshop each summer for teachers of English and Language Arts. The team of teachers are leaders in the public school system who are considered master teachers of their discipline as well as one of the directors Eveleen Lorton is from the University of Miami.

The workshop is a three day workshop divided into 1/2 day seminars with a teacher.The workshop covered different areas of writing but all focused on the encouragement of young writers. The organization of seminars is well thought out because none of the seminars repeated the same lessons, and all of the lessons were interactive; as teachers, we wrote and worked out the teachers' lesson plans to see how they worked and shared results.

The following seminars I plan to incorporate into my teaching this year: 1- editing and proofing This seminar focused on teaching a writing skill or grammar rule. Students are asked to free write in reponse to a common prompt and then use highlighters to acknowledge what the writer did well--incorporating the taught skill or lesson. Other editing classes I have attended used highlighters to note what is incorrect. I liked this idea because in a workshop setting, students can highlight what they did well and then go back to add more of the "good". 2- "Start with what they know and then teach them something they dont know." This was a great philospohy and made so much sense for writing strategies. The teacher took a simple nursery rhyme and then had us in groups rewrite the nursey rhyme using an alphabetical order to begin each sentence. This is how she showed the use of transition words beyond the traditional "then," "next", "first". Students worked in a group of 4 and had a sheet with A through Z drawn on it with lines to write next to the letter. One student writes the group's sentences to tell the story in aphabetical order. Students could change the plot, but the end needed to be similar to the original. This was a great excercise in seeking words to begin sentences. 3- Importance of free writing This lesson is good for journal writing and short writing excercises. The teacher prompts the students to write a series of events from an action of the day thus far. Our prompt was to write about our morning, from the time we woke until we pulled into the parking lot. The instructions were to include a step by step account of the events and a feeling with each step. The results were shared and everyone noticed the similarities of a morning routine. It only took 5 - 10 minutes and was a calming way to beign a class, especially one that will include writing--almost like a jump start. I will use during the short story contest writing workshops. 4- Art as characters This sounded non- orginal when first presented but turned out to be a very creative writing session. The teacher collected photos, mostly from picture calendars, and placed them into groups. Each group represented a protagonist, antagonist, setting, and conflict. You walked around to the various piles of groups and chose a picture to represent one of the elements of the story. Then you kept the pictures, returned to your desk, and wrote your story. This requires a large collections of images with various periods of time represented and tones, but defintely worth it for the creativity really flowed for the writers. The writers had somewhere to jump from but without restrictions, so it was an ecouraging and creative excercise.