Wordsmith creative writing curriculum helps kids develop writing skills that will last a lifetime.
Teaching writing skills is simple and effective with this wonderful creative writing course. Wordsmith Apprentice is the 4th - 6th grade level of the highly popular Wordsmith Series, which is an exciting creative writing course for Grade 4 through High School. Wordsmith is for young people who want to improve their writing skills. Step-by-step instructions are provided that will help any writer improve his techniques.
An easy-to-use writing course encouraging the development of practical writing skills as students participate in every role on a newspaper staff: editor, reporter, writer, etc. This program helps children to develop a love for writing as they express themselves through sentence writing and review, paragraph writing, persuasive writing, opinion writing, reporting, comics, and much more.
Step-by-step instructions make teaching easy. What a difference this series will make as you and your student watch the ability to express thoughts in writing grow and unfold. Creative writing is one of the most basic skills anyone will ever learn. Learning to express oneself through writing goes hand-in-hand with learning to think.
Wordsmith Apprentice has all the practicality, humor and fun of WordSmith, but written for the younger student, ages 9-12. In Wordsmith Apprentice, students pretend to be writers for a small-town local newspaper. This introduces an element of imagination that makes the writing projects fun and interesting.
ABOUT OUR PHILOSOPHY
Creative writing is one of the most basic skills anyone will ever learn, and learning to write goes hand-in-hand with learning to think. To organize information, recall details, and get right to the point are hallmarks of good writing and clear thinking. It’s no wonder that verbal scores count for twice as many points as math scores on standardized tests. The ability to work with words and the ideas behind them is absolutely vital to any kind of academic learning and vocation.
My own experience with teaching writing to children is that some love it from the start, but most don’t. A common misconception is that writing (especially "creative"writing) is a special gift that can’t be taught. Wrong! If that suspicion is lurking in your mind, you will be ahead of the game if you understand this simple fact: Writing is a craft. Any craft can be taught. How does one learn? By learning how to use the tools, mastering the techniques, and practicing. Of course, it helps if the student brings some enthusiasm to the task. Wordsmith Apprentice attempts to arouse that enthusiasm and build those vital skills.
ABOUT THE APPROACH
The intermediate grades (4th, 5th and 6th) are the ideal time to become familiar with the "tools" of writing: words, sentences, and paragraphs. Since use improves with practice, students should have plenty of opportunities to use their tools. But there’s the rub for many of us parents. Grammar-book exercises, we’ve found, are not applicable to our unique child’s experience, and the skills apparently mastered on the model sentences don’t carry over to actual writing projects. Creative writing projects for beginners should meet three criteria: they should be firmly rooted in the writer’s experience, they should build on skills already learned while stretching to new ones, and they should be at least a little fun.
Wordsmith Apprentice meets these criteria within the framework of journalism. The scenario of writing for a small-town weekly newspaper introduces an element of imagination that makes the writing projects fun and interesting while at the same time it reinforces practical skills.
ABOUT THE SCOPE
Your student joins the "staff" of an unnamed newspaper. The "editor" provides instruction on fundamentals of writing according to the following outline:
PART ONE. NOUNS, VERBS AND BASIC SENTENCE STRUCTURE
This section introduces five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, articles, pronouns and conjunctions, If these terms are totally new, some supplementary grammar work will probably be needed. The focus in this section is not so much on what these words are as how they are used in a sentence. Articles are introduced with nouns as "noun markers," pronouns as noun substitutes. The verb category includes action, linking and helping verbs. Conjunctions are introduced in connection with sentence structure.
WRITING PROJECTS IN PART ONE:
Application for employment
"For Sale" ads
"Help Wanted" ads
Haiku poetry
Sports (action-verb) poetry
Writing definitions
Four-sentence captions Invitations
Thank-you notes
Headlines
Various "Imagination Stretchers" throughout
[Please Note: Understanding basic sentence structure is vital to learning to write, so you may need to have your student repeat some or all of the PART ONE exercises before proceeding to PART TWO.]
PART TWO - MODIFIERS AND MORE COMPLEX SENTENCES
Nouns and verbs (or their substitutes) always lay the foundation of a sentence. Everything else is a modifier attached to the subject, verb or object. PART TWO addresses three types of modifiers: adjectives, adverbs and prepositional phrases (another type of modifier, the clause, is usually not introduced until 6th grade).
WRITING PROJECTS IN PART TWO:
Word games and puzzles
Display advertising
Expanded captions Editing
Travel writing
Book reviews
Various "Imaginations Stretchers" throughout
PART THREE - ORGANIZING AND REPORTING
Once a student feels comfortable with the basics of sentence structure, it’s time to learn how to organize those sentences in a logical fashion. That’s what paragraphing is all about. The student gains experience in recognizing a topic sentence, writing in sequence and summarizing the main points. With a grasp on these principles, he or she is ready to move on to reporting and the "five W’s" Answering the Who, What, When Where and Why questions gives the student a flexible framework for writing simple reports, stories, even letters. Beginning writers usually need some such outline to help them get started, and the old journalism standby (the "five W’s") works remarkably well with all kinds of writing assignments, "creative" or not.
WRITING PROJECTS IN PART THREE:
Recipes
Household hints
Program synopses
News briefs
Comics (dialogue)
Sports stories
News articles
Editorials
Various "Imagination Stretchers" throughout
The purpose of the course is to awaken students to the fascinating possibilities of using English language and imagination while they learn solid principles of writing structure, content and organization. The course allows plenty of opportunity for a teacher to be involved by responding to the child’s work, offering suggestions when asked, or even doing some of the exercises along with the student.
In these early attempts at creative writing, children need encouragement more than iron discipline. That’s not to say that grammatical or spelling errors should not be corrected, but revision needn’t play so large a role in the writing process as it will later.
The Wordsmith creative writing course is not divided into "lessons" so much as topics. It will be up to you how many pages to cover in a week or a day. Many fourth-graders will be enthusiastic about the course until they bog down in basic sentence structure, say, or prepositional phrases. If they come to a point where Wordsmith Apprentice is more pain than gain, it might be wise to lay the book aside for a couple of months while they gain more proficiency in grammar.
On the other hand, some children will steam right through the book and beg for more. These literary wonders may be excited by the prospect of editing their own newspaper. It’s hard to imagine a project more conducive to developing writing skills.
The student will need a spiral notebook for some of the writing assignments and any additional projects inspired by the book.
Answers for some of the exercises are found on pages A & B at the end of this workbook. You may remove or leave them, whichever you feel is best.
Two supplementary resources will be very helpful to this course. One is a thesaurus (specifically called for in a few exercises). Paperback copies of Roget’sThesaurus are easily available at any bookstore, but no teacher should overlook the editions that are written especially for children. One of these is A First Thesaurus, by Harriet Wittels and Joan Greisman.
The other resource is a newspaper. Big-city newspapers are best, simply because of the greater variety of material in them. I realize that some of this material is not appropriate for children, and the skepticism that many parents share about the main stream media is justified. Still, it will be very instructive to use a few newspapers as references throughout this course. If you do not subscribe to a newspaper, I suggest you buy one Sunday edition, one Saturday and one daily. These three will last you through the entire course--the news doesn’t have to be new!
Writing is one of the most important skills you will ever learn. Whether you like it or not, at times in your life you will be called upon to express your thoughts in writing. Just suppose:
You are asked why you want a certain job.
You want to send your mother a special birthday or holiday greeting.
Your local hang-gliding club volunteers you to write the club history.
Your boss demands a report on sewing needle factories in South America (due tomorrow).
You are called upon to teach a Sunday school class.
You want to convince someone to marry you.
All of these will be much easier if you know how to write down your own thoughts.
Have you ever tried to play a violin? It looks easy, but when you pick up the instrument and draw the bow across its strings, the sound that comes out is not at all what you hoped to hear! If you want to play you’ll have to learn how. A teacher can show you where to put your fingers and how to handle the bow, and of course you must practice. You’ll start with simple tunes like "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," then go on to more complicated ones as your skills improve.
We learn to write the same way: by learning the skills of writing and then practicing them. By going slowly, step by step and year by year, we become writers.
This book will help you get started on the road to becoming a writer. To make the "journey" more interesting, we’ll pretend that you have gone to work for a small town newspaper.
Newspaper work involves all kinds of writing, from very simple to very complex. Besides this book you will need an ordinary spiral notebook and several pencils. You should also keep a Sunday and weekday copy of your local newspaper nearby because you will be using them for reference.
We’ll start with little jobs like classified ads, picture captions, and "fillers." You will practice writing complete sentences, then use them in advertising, book reviews and recipes. When you become a "staff reporter" you’ll be ready to write news stories and editorials.
But first things first. Let’s meet the editor of our newspaper.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Janie B. Cheaney became interested in creative writing at an early age. She began educating her two children at home in 1985, during which time she developed methods of writing instruction. Over the years, Janie has gained further insights while teaching various classes and workshops for home schooled children and their parents. In Janie's spare time, she has published articles, plays, and short fiction. She lives with her husband and children in Missouri. |
