Writer’s Workshop

At Acton everything is very organized. It’s fun and it impresses me every time. There’s plenty of information about the writer’s workshops. I have concentrated the important parts here, and as an example of a workshop, I shall tell you about the writer’s workshop that the Eagles work on in the current session.

The goal: To instill a love of writing, reading and story-telling and to empower young heroes for the rest of their lives with an understanding that putting clear thoughts to paper leads to freedom and opportunity. To establish the habit of always striving for excellence through repeated process and daily writing for the entirety of the Elementary School journey.

Structure: Each session of Writers’ Workshop is based on a different genre. Using Corbett Harrison’s Writing Fix curriculum, the guides design a new writing quest each session following the same format. The Eagles have full freedom in their choice of content; however, they must learn how to navigate the creative constraints that come with each genre. Writers’ Workshop takes place 2-3 days per week for 1.5 hours. It begins with a launch that includes a call to action for the day. During the launches, Eagles are introduced to new writing techniques through various mentor texts.

The process: The workshop process is fixed and always includes the same steps:

1. Pre-writing: The pre-writing stage includes brainstorming, alone or in pairs, during which the Eagle learns about the workshop’s genre and decides on the general structure of her work. The pre-writing stage changes from workshop to workshop and depends on the genre chosen for that workshop. For example, in the workshop about poetry, the Eagles read many examples of poems, read texts about poetry, and work on a self-study challenge whose theme is “What is poetry?”
2. Draft: Next, each Eagle writes an initial draft of his work. The work at this stage usually happens individually. The goal of work is to powerfully develop the Eagle’s ability to turn thoughts into words. At this stage, the Eagles are supposed to write as much as possible, regardless of grammar or spelling, the idea is for them to enter into a flow of writing and to be able to turn their idea into a story.
3. Proofreading – In the stage of proofreading, the Eagles concentrate on the following five principles:
   1. Idea development
   2. Word selection
   3. Personal voice
   4. Flow of text
   5. Text organization
4. Peer Review – When the Eagles feel that their text is satisfactory, they choose another Eagle from the studio to review their work. The guiding question for an Eagle providing feedback is “Is this your best work?” Following the feedback, they change the story based on the feedback if they choose to accept it and at that point most of the work is done.
5. Editing – At this stage the Eagles work on improving the grammar of their creation. In the first stage, each Eagle works on the grammar of his work, according to the level at which he is in grammar. Then the Eagles go through each other’s creations, each one according to her grammatical abilities. At that point punctuation, capitalization, spelling and exact word selection becomes the focus.
6. Publishing – the last stage is the exhibition of the work. If the genre is speech or poetry, the exhibition will include reading in front of an audience. As for other genres, the process may include publishing the book, participating in a competition, etc.

In the current session, the workshop that the Eagles go through is “creative writing.” The idea is to write a picture book, with the help of the https://storybird.com website. The site allows to choose ready-made images, from a huge database of professional drawings on the site, imagine a story to the images and then to publish the story as a real book (by the way, I strongly recommend visiting and getting to know the site, it’s super cool!). The goal is for the Eagles to experience the art of storytelling, experience creative writing and of course give each other feedback on their work. This workshop is planned to last for twelve classes and the workshop is split into 5 modules as follows:

1. Pre-writing – planning the story in general terms
2. Draft – selecting the images and writing the story
3. Proofreading – completion of peer review and correcting accordingly
4. Editing – Improving the text in terms of grammar, punctuation, spelling and word selection
5. Publishing – printing of finished books through the site

That’s it for this time. I know it’s long, but I hope it’s worth reading.