Dynamic Writing 2

Teaching classes at a home-school co-op, in my own home with my children, and in public school classrooms, I have learned that students need to have choices in their writing. Creativity is not something that magically starts at the age of twelve. It is nurtured through childhood, into the middle school years, and on into adulthood. We nurture creativity by offering choices. In this curriculum, students have required topics, optional topics, and general topics that nurture decision-making within the confines of an assigned essay style. Students are required to write to a certain standard, to use a certain page format, and to use specific writing constructs. At the same time, they are allowed the choice of topic, content, and the placement of those writing constructs. Unlike other curriculums, there is no requirement that the third sentence in every paragraph must follow a particular sentence construction. Sentence construction variations are helpful for students to learn, but I know that students learn them best when they create their own and place them in their essays where they choose. To force a student to write a certain sentence construct is to ask for that student to put aside their own natural instinct for flow and pacing and use something different. In this curriculum, I do ask students to use sentence variations at least once in each essay and that can interrupt the flow and pace, but I try to give them the opportunity to decide the placement of that sentence variation. This lessens the interruption, and we will discuss reading the text out loud to ensure the pace and flow they choose. Near the end of this course and into the third year of lessons in Dynamic Writing 3, students are given more and more freedom to choose which sentence variations they use and how often they use them. In addition to sentence variations and other writing concepts, students will learn and practice various types of writing: essay, poetry, and story. Students have a chance to explore each type and are invited to consider which type they enjoy or find the most challenging. It's good to assess our strengths, and students will be invited to do so, to help them engage in the learning process of writing. Reading is an essential part of learning to write. While this class was originally constructed to meet the needs of student writers and parents who wanted their students to have a writing-focused curriculum, I have added some lessons in literature and reading. Reading literature and reading "just for fun" books can help a writer unconsciously learn how to write, from the grammar level to the overall structural level. Students will be encouraged to read and to think about their reading choices while they write. Writing is an important skill in today's communication-hungry world. We need to form our words clearly and to understand the emotions that those words may evoke, intentionally or unintentionally. From casual journal entries to formal, multiple-draft essays, students will write each day. This daily writing practice will help create good, overall writing habits and an increased comfort level with writing. Relaxed writers who have training in good sentence structure and essay structures will find more success in all types of writing. I wrote this curriculum with the desire to increase student success with writing.