New Writing Curriculum

I have been coming up with writing assignments for Casia  this school year in an ad hoc fashion. I wanted to combine it with history, so she did a book report on a historical fiction novel. I wanted to make sure she could write an essay with supporting points and assigned her a topic idea I got online. I thought it would be good for her to write about something she learned during her ancient Greece unit and she picked to write an essay on Greek mythology. All of these have been good assignments to strengthen her writing mechanics and enhance her planning skills, but they've lacked a cohesive strategy. It wasn't that I was unhappy with curriculum, it's just that I wasn't completely satisfied with it either. 

I wasn't actively seeking a new source, but I very serendipitously discovered this box set in a discount bin at the local grocery store. It was $6. Tough to beat that price. 

It's not an actually curriculum, but rather a guide with writing tips, geared towards preadolescent girls. It's part of a Littlemissmatched's series and it's called The Writer in Me!. I picked it because Casia is always telling me about how she wants to be a writer when she grows up. She already has a story line (long enough to fill multiple books) running through her head. She just lacks the ability to put those ideas down onto paper. I started encouraging her to write her story awhile back, but she really struggles. I think it's too overwhelming. She's been typing it up, but will only get a couple of lines down at a time. She doesn't seem to make much progress and I thought this might be able to help her. 

If you can get past the fact that it actually sounds like a preadolescent girl talking, using phrases like 'bestest', 'incredibly incredible' and 'awesomely awesome', it has some really helpful strategies for better writing. It breaks down key elements like character, setting, and dialog into some very accessible lessons. For each topic it suggests an activity. The kit even includes little notebooks and journal to make it more fun (what 9 year old girl doesn't like to have a small notebook?).

Each chapter focuses on a different genre: the short story, poetry, playwriting, etc. and they each bring a different aspect of writing into focus. Casia has completed three of the activities for the first chapter on writing short stories. Her first assignment was to use an old picture to help set the stage for a story. She did an adequate job with it, but lacked some of the details to really establish the setting. Casia has a tendency to want to get to the action of a story quickly, so this was a challenge for her, but I think she's leaning the importance of developing the setting to give the reader more perspective.

In the second assignment, Casia had to use dialog to help capture someone's character. Again, she struggled a bit with it. This is where I realized that her tendency is to summarize her thoughts and move on instead of relishing in the details. So for her third assignment, she had to write a short story where a single emotion was the driving force. In the book, the example of Poe's The Tell-tale Heart is used, so Casia and I read that before she began. I stressed that she needed to slow the story down and use a lot of imagery to help convey her ideas. With this lesson, Casia really took it heart and came up with a really good story of two girls riding the bus home from the last day of school. Each girl talked about how she was planning on spending her summer. She used some great imagery and description to contrast their views of a perfect summer. I think she's really starting to get it and I look forward to reading more of her stories.