Fun ideas for middle school writing class

[aaplank]

I have been approached by our co-op leader to teach a writing class with the age range of 6th-8th grade. We meet 1x per week for 12 weeks, have a long Christmas break and then meet 1x a week for 12 weeks in the winter/spring. So 24 class times meeting for 1 hour each.

I want something open and go, fun, yet challenging. I am assuming everyone would be at different levels. I would also assign work outside of class, but there is no grading or other accountability present.

I want to narrow my focus of writing instruction because I don't think I have a lot of time to go broad.

 

Any ideas would be appreciated! Thanks.

[freesia]

Jump In or IEW Theme book

[moonlight]

Look into "Don't Forget to Write" for the secondary grades.

[jobos12]

Depending on what you want to actually teach, you could also look at "Reviving the Essay" or "Story of my life" by Gretchen Bernabei. I did it once a week with a group of different ages - we did the structure and a few writing activities during lessons, and the kids finished their writing poeces at home. It is quite different to other programs around, so it might not be what you are after.

[aaplank]

Thanks, jobos! These look very promising. Are they open and go lessons or do I have to add to it to cover an hour of class time?

[aaplank]

Moonlight, "Don't Forget to Write" looks great! Thanks for the recommendation.

[Dmmetler]

We did a comic book class last fall for a middle/high school age co-op, from storyboarding and character creation to drawing to actually physically creating the book. Some of the kids were more into it than others, but it was kind of a neat way to get a lot of writing instruction in for a group that included some kids who really, really hate writing.

 

 

[aaplank]

Dmmetler, that sounds like fun! I'm interested in learning more about what the finished product looked like. Anything special for creating the actual book?

[Dmmetler]

There are a lot of good websites and apps. We used https://www.pixton.com/for the kids who weren't comfortable drawing and did webcomics. Some did short single panel stuff, others did much more involved stories. Here's another site for those who wanted to do a physical book. You can open the templates in a drawing program and adapt (we used Notability on the iPad, which let them both draw and type text), or for luddites like my DD, print and then let them draw their own. The last is the hardest to edit and change. We were able to print and then bind the final projects into books for the kids to take home (we're homeschool moms, so a lot of us have binding machines, laminators, etc. It wasn't a big group, so we didn't explore getting them done through something like Snapfish, but that would work, too. You could also use Createspace or Lulu.com and just not make it public).

 

The neat thing is that the pre-writing phase really doesn't change-you still have to figure out your plot points, characters, and so on. We used a lot of the stuff from the EdX Stan Lee course on the history and influence of comics, too.

 

 

 

[aaplank]

My kids would have loved this class! The idea of this is getting my creative juices going ... Off to check out the links.

 

Thank you!!

[Haiku]

Igniting Your Writing is lots of awesome fun!

[aaplank]

Igniting Your Writing seems like a perfect fit - it even has 24 lessons!

[jobos12]

Both of them have 'spin-offs' in them, which you could use if you need some extra time. 

 

They aren't completely open-and-go though - I'd say that each lesson is, but you would need to work out the overall direction you wanted to go first. Does that make sense?