Courses

Join us as we learn to craft amazing sentences using The Writing Revolution method and support each other in creative writing projects that emerge from each student’s imagination. While they are encouraged to capture their creative writing ideas in any way that works for them (having an adult scribe for them, writing it themselves, voice to text, etc.), they are equally encouraged to do their sentence practice independently to help develop the automaticity needed for those skills. Each week, we will spend 30-40 minutes exploring new sentence concepts and ‘workshopping’ the sentence homework.  We will then spend 20-30 minutes sharing and discussing their creative writing projects.

The following will be the shape of the creative writing portion of the course:

Each student will develop an imaginary world that they then use to inform their pieces. They will have complete flexibility to ditch their initial ideas and go in a completely different direction at any time. We will use the NaNoWriMo Young Writer workbooks to guide the order in which we initially think about devising the setting, plot, and characters. Students will have the option of using the workbook itself or going freestyle.  After everyone has devised a context for their work, there will be a range of creative writing prompts and projects exploring non-academic ‘production’ where they put their inner editor on the shelf and just focus on creating: stories, vivid setting, poetry, comics, fictional letters, fictional picture captions, dialogue, and so on. The goal will be to experiment with a wide range of creative writing forms without focusing on the spelling, grammar, or punctuation of those pieces.

The following will be the shape of the academic sentences portion of the course:

This portion is designed to support and enhance the writing of academic sentence structures. We will be using the Hochman Method, as detailed in The Writing Revolution, to move from sentence fragments, appositives, subordinating conjunctions, sentence combining, and sentence expanding to a beginning exploration of paragraph writing through exploring using point form, creating summary sentences, and of course the basic structure of a paragraph itself. In their sentence practice work, we focus on every detail from punctuation to grammar and content.