High Performance 6-12 Creative Writing Curriculum: 

Before Students Can Write to Learn…

They Must First Learn to Write!

 Each year, home school parents and public school teachers face the same dilemma:  How can I teach my students to become more powerful writers?  How can I give them the tools and passion they need to go beyond writing “more of the same” year after year?

This curriculum has been tested with over 6000 students 6-12.  State-wide Writing Assessment have confirmed its effectiveness (see “Test Scores”).   A descriptive writing mode is the tool to accomplish the skill development that we all seek.  This is your opportunity to lead your student to life changing breakthroughs in writing, read and using language at the highest levels.

Year after year, students are tasked with writing assignments across the curriculum.  But most of us recognize that merely asking for more writing–when not accompanied by systematic, rigorous writing instruction–means that your students end up producing “more of the same.”  They run in circles with one foot nailed to the floor:  They do not learn to evaluate language, their vocabularies are limited, their fluency is not improved, and the potential power of their ideas is smothered by an avalanche of  Valley Girl fillers such as “you know, like, kind of, sort of, I mean, know what I’m saying” and so on.  Such students are going nowhere fast, and everyone can see that they are in need of rescue. 

This curriculum begins with the assumption that most students know very little about writing sentences.  A sentence is a structure that is meant to holds and expresses a complete thought, a complete idea.  So naturally, we begin with simple sentence structure.  Ultimately, we are required to learn variations of clauses and phrases.  We learn to generate tasteful and accurate Synonyms, and we learn to identify (and to conjugate) the Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs and Participial Phrases that takes our efforts to a new level. This may sound like a grammar class to some.  We have all had them before, and we have never learned very much from them.  Activities are not connected, not systematic, and the result is that most everyone claims that language and grammar are boring and useless.  But this curriculum is not a “grammar” class.  It’s a Thinking class; a Doing class; a Creative class; a Performance class.  We start simple, and we move forward at a logical and deliberate pace.  Together, we learn by going where we have to go!

Soon enough, we will enter the domain of clause structure: Compound, Complex and Compound Complex.  But we never forget the stiff-necked Simple clauses that always packs a punch.  At the same time, we learn to use varieties of Participial Phrases (Introductory, Adverbial, Non-Essential) that insist upon their place in the scheme.  And of course we can’t forget the colorful Appositives, Doubled Adjectives, Doubled Verbs, Doubled Adjectives, and the Doubled Participial Phrases that we will soon come to recognize as familiar friends.

None of this is about “over writing.” Instead, this is about learning to see, learning to listen, learning to imagine, and learning to evaluate.  Learning to solidify the impressions that we are trying to bring to life in our work. When direct and simple is the best choice, we use that. When complexity is required, we can deliver that too.   We must always focus on what we are trying to achieve, and we must be able to use those tools that can take us to where we want to go.

Imagine a selection of sentences written by your home school student as part of a short (one paragraph) creative writing assignment entitled “Still Life: An Old Work Shoe”:

These sentences were crafted by a middle level students who was four weeks into the program.  At this stage we are  deliberately over-writing in order to learn to understand and deploy all possibilities. And this awareness will be possessed by each attentive student, including those who are knee capped by below grade level skills.

Consider this 9th student’s description of the Einstein’s original hand written “E=mc2”:

Impacts for Students, Parents and Teachers