Fables, Myths and Fairy Tales: Writing About Literature

The following is a description of a class I'll be offering to homeschoolers this spring at the Huckleberry Center for Creative Learning in Valencia, California.  All classes for the spring semester begin the week of  February 7, 2011 and end June 2, 2011.  If you have questions regarding registration, please visit:  www.hucklc.org.  Huck is a vendor for several area charter schools.  

This class will be on Mondays from 2-3:30pm.

Fables, Myths and Fairy Tales:  Writing About Literature

(Ages: 8-11)

This is an IEW (Institute for Excellence in Writing) – style class, so along with learning about classic literature, students will be practicing a number of important skills to help them become stronger writers.  As we look at classic fables, students will learn strategies for “Note Taking,” and even more importantly, “Writing from Notes.”  We’ll use some of the masterpieces of Greek mythology to learn summarizing skills.  “Story Sequence Outlines” will help students break these narratives into categories (Characters, Setting, Conflict, Climax and Resolution), making them easier to write about.  We’ll then combine those note taking and narrative summary skills to help us summarize references.  This is an excellent way for students to prepare for the research skills they’ll need for more advanced writing.  We’ll use fairy tales to give students practice with an IEW technique called “Writing from Pictures.”  This technique trains students to isolate the main ideas and develop their own analysis of them in a fun and creative way.  As we use fables, myths and fairy tales to sharpen our analytical, expository and summarizing skills, we’ll also be stretching our creative writing muscles by writing our own fables, myths and fairy tales.  This class will create its very own book, which will include a fable, myth and fairy tale from each student.  Students will undoubtedly have a lot of fun with this project and we’ll proudly display our book at the end of semester show!  Everyone will need access to a word processing program to aid with the revision process, so students who don’t have strong typing skills may also wish to participate in the Keyboarding Class this semester.

Homework:  Writing (approx.) 1 hour/week

Materials Fees:  $20

Tuition:  $210 (For details see www.hucklc.org)

Powerful Paragraphs

The following is a description of a class I'll be offering to homeschoolers this spring at the Huckleberry Center for Creative Learning in Valencia, California.  All classes for the spring semester begin the week of  February 7, 2011 and end June 2, 2011.  If you have questions regarding registration, please visit:  www.hucklc.org.  Huck is a vendor for several area charter schools.  

This class will be on Wednesdays from 10:30-12noon

Powerful Paragraphs

Ages:  8-11

Writing well is an essential skill that will help students succeed in all their classes.  Whether you are an enthusiastic writer or a bit reluctant, this class will strengthen your skills and lay the foundation for future success.  Learning to write well involves mastering the parts of an essay before building towards the whole.   This class is designed to introduce students to a wide variety of paragraph structures and give them lots of practice in planning, developing and focusing powerful paragraphs.  We will use many of the lessons from the IEW (Institute for Excellence in Writing) handbook A Writer’s Guide to Powerful Paragraphs to help us create unified and coherent paragraphs.  We will focus on creating strong topic sentences to control our paragraphs as we learn about and practice a wide variety of paragraph structures, including:  description, definition, narrative, process analysis, example, analogy, division, classification, comparison/contrast, and cause & effect.  By the end of the semester, each student will have completed a special “writing project portfolio” containing their polished paragraphs and essays.  Students will definitely work hard in this class and do a lot of writing.  There will be weekly homework assignments in addition to our in class work, so that students will have lots of opportunities to hone their skills.  Everyone will need access to a word processing program to aid with the revision process, so students who don’t have typing skills may also wish to participate in the Keyboarding Class this semester.

Homework:  Writing (approx.) 1 hour/week

Materials Fees $20

Tuition:  $240 (For details see www.hucklc.org)

Creative Writing and Keyboarding Games

The following is a description of a class I'll be offering to homeschoolers this spring at the Huckleberry Center for Creative Learning in Valencia, California.  All classes for the spring semester begin the week of  February 7, 2011 and end June 2, 2011.  If you have questions regarding registration, please visit:  www.hucklc.org.  Huck is a vendor for several area charter schools.  

This class will be on Mondays from 12:30-2pm.

Creative Writing and Keyboarding Games

Ages 9-11

Are you the kind of typist who has to hunt and peck for every letter?  Slow and frustrating isn’t it?  We all know the value of computer keyboarding skills, but not everyone realizes how much proper keyboarding technique and high typing speeds improve your writing skills.  Word processors are essential to writing in our internet age and revision (the key to all strong writing) happens far more often if students can type as fast they think.  So, why don’t all students have these skills?  Well, “Learn to Type” computer software can get boring very fast.  This class will teach students proper QWERTY keyboarding skills through games and creative writing!  We’ll learn proper finger placement through games like “Typing Football,” “Story Starters,” “Keyboard Bingo” “Dinosaur Duels,” “Keyboarding Baseball,” “Simon Says,” and many others.  We won’t however, just be giving our fingers a good workout, we’ll be stretching our creative writing muscles as well as we learn how to craft a well organized story.  We’ll use plot outlines and story-idea maps to help us sketch outlines of our stories and then we’ll create interesting characters and settings to keep our readers enthralled.  Our big project for the class will be compiling a portfolio of each student’s best stories to show our friends at Huck during the End of Semester show!  This is a wonderful creative writing opportunity for students and will allow them to pick up those all in important typing skills as well.  For students to write with ease, they really need to be able to type as fast as think.  This class will get students on the road to improving these essential skills.

Homework:  Regular Typing Practice (15 minutes/day) & Short Story Writing (1 hour/week)

Materials Fees:  $20

Tuition:  $210 (For details see www.hucklc.org)

Argumentative Writing & Blogging

The following is a description of a class I'll be offering to homeschoolers this spring at the Huckleberry Center for Creative Learning in Valencia, California.  All classes for the spring semester begin the week of  February 7, 2011 and end June 2, 2011.  If you have questions regarding registration, please visit:  www.hucklc.org.  Huck is a vendor for several area charter schools.  


This class will be on Mondays from 10:30-12noon.

Argumentative Writing & Blogging

Ages:  12+

Writing is one of the most important and essential skills a student can learn.  Writing well allows someone to express their ideas, argue their opinions and demonstrate their knowledge.  Writing also helps students to learn.  The process of organizing, developing and arguing ideas is an excellent way to learn about any subject.  We will write essays that inform, critique and persuade.   In this class, students will work on a combination of traditional, argumentative essays (approx. 3-4 pages in length), and smaller, but more frequent argumentative essays/posts as they design and maintain their own blogs.  Blogging provides a wonderful opportunity for students to get audience feedback and blogging several times a week will challenge students to expand their creativity and work those “writing/thinking” muscles.  Students will blog about topics THEY want to know more about and create posts that help them gain and RETAIN that knowledge.  This is a class that will provide plenty of opportunities for students to practice the process of organizing their ideas into unified and coherent essays and blog posts.  We will look at essays together as a class so students can also learn about the reactions their writing elicits from others.  Writing is, first and foremost, communication, so we’ll look at both ends of that transaction: the writer and the reader.  Whether you want to prepare for the type of writing you’ll need to master for college success, or just want to practice your persuasive writing skills, this is the class for you. 

Ages 12+

Homework:  Writing (approx.) 2 hours/week

(Bring laptops if possible -we have 4 available at Huck).

Materials Fees:  $20

Tuition $210 (For details see www.hucklc.org)

Creative Writing: How to Outline Your Way to a Terrific Story!

The following is a description of a class I'll be offering to homeschoolers this spring at the Huckleberry Center for Creative Learning in Valencia, California.  All classes for the spring semester begin the week of  February 7, 2011 and end June 2, 2011.  If you have questions regarding registration, please visit:  www.hucklc.org.  Huck is a vendor for several area charter schools.  


This class will be on Wednesdays from 12:30-2pm. 

To see completed projects from the Fall, 2010 version of this class, click here.  And to see details from our recent "Book Signing", click here.

Creative Writing:  How to Outline Your Way to a Terrific Story!

Ages 11+ 

J.K. Rowling outlined her Harry Potter series for 5 full years before she began writing the 1^st book!  This method allowed her to develop ideas, maintain cohesion and create connections throughout ALL 7 novels that surprised and delighted her readers.  Before we even put pen to paper in this class, we will disable, bind and gag our “inner editors” to free ourselves to create and imagine -- uninhibited (don’t worry we’ll eventually free them, but only towards the end J).  We’ll then start in on our work by looking closely at the characteristics of great novels and drafting our own “Story-Idea Maps.”  We’ll then move on to character and conflict development as we make “Scene Cards” to help chart our stories.  We’ll use the concept of “roller coasters” to figuratively outline our plots.   Once our plots are outlined we’ll explore and create various “settings” and “moods” for our scenes before turning to the tricky art of writing strong dialogue.  We’ll use “cartoon strips” to help us develop and sharpen our dialogue before we move backwards to examine “great starts” and how to hook a reader in the very first pages.  Narrowing our focus, we’ll then move on to “details, details, details” and create “Theme Spiders” to make sure our stories have a meaningful impact on our readers.  We’ll then utilize character interview “lists” to help sharpen and individualize not only our protagonist and antagonist, but supporting characters as well.  We’ll spend two weeks participating in “Revision Workshops” where students can ask for help from the class on particularly tough scenes, and finally, mercifully, unleash our inner editors to rage their way across our pages before submitting our “novellas” to “Lulu.com” for self-publishing.  Each student will leave the course with a published, paperback-bound version of their book in hand (with more available for friends, family and general readers to buy online).   We’ll even design “book jacket” advertisements for each book to hand out at the “End of Semester” show!   Although we’ll be utilizing our outlines to create fiction, the techniques we learn will be quite useful (in fact, invaluable) in expository and argumentative writing as well.  The ability to outline quickly and efficiently is especially crucial for timed writing tests. Organizing ideas into a cohesive whole is essential for good writing of any kind and students will enjoy learning to wield this useful tool through creative writing. 

Age Range:  11+

Homework:  Writing (2-3 hours/week)

Materials Fee:  $25 (includes a paperback bound copy of finished book) 

Tuition:  $240  (For details see www.hucklc.org)