Creative Writing With Grammar: Semester 1 (Middle School English)

Class Experience:  Students will have the opportunity to be fully engaged through short lessons, Power Point slides, worksheets, games, individual sharing, and inspiration from each other.  Weekly writing assignments will be given and asked to be shared in class.  At any time, a student can decline to share or ask me to share their writing instead.

Week 1:  Discovering the 5 Senses
Introduce yourself and share your favorite animal.  Free write about your favorite animal.  Discuss the 5 senses (things on the outside) and ways to insert them into your writing. Add new details about your favorite animal.  Review nouns and pronouns with a worksheet and/or interactive game. Homework: Write a creative pet story (multiple prompt ideas will be provided).
Week 2:  Finding What Is on the Inside
Discuss a list of word affirmations, and share homework essays in a positive environment where classmates are encouraged to find “one good thing” about each essay.  See how feedback from others, as well as listening to other writing styles, inspires the writing process.  Discuss how to add "things on the inside" to writing.  Free write with a prompt about an unusual situation.  Review nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives with a worksheet and/or interactive game.  Homework:  Write a creative story about the day you woke up in a house that was not your house (add feelings - scaffolding provided).
Week 3:  Show vs. Tell 
Discuss words that "show" the reader instead of telling.  Free write about a silly prompt and use "show" words.  Review nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs with a worksheet and/or interactive game.  Homework: Write a descriptive story about a pig flying to the moon (scaffolding provided)
Week 4: Using Voice in Writing and Feelings
Discuss ourselves!  Play a game about our likes and dislikes.  Free write about one thing we discovered.  Review nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions with a worksheet and/or interactive game.  Homework:  Write about yourself (various prompts provided)
Week 5: Creating a Need
Discuss persuasive writing and where it can be found.  Create an advertisement for a useless product.  Review nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions with a worksheet and/or interactive game.  Talk about the writing process and the elements of a good paragraph.  Homework:  Write a persuasive paragraph (prompts and scaffolding provided).
Class 6: Convince Me, If You Can
Play a quick game where students choose a side.  Using provided prompt, choose a side and free write supportive reasons for your position.  Review sentence fragments and run-on sentences with a worksheet and/or interactive game.  Homework:  Write a persuasive argument for one of the provided prompts using at least 3 reasons to support your position (prompts and scaffolding provided).
Class 7:  Persuasive Proposals
Discuss how to write a proposal about something that we do not agree with.  Free write about a silly prompt that most will not agree with. Review comma usage with a worksheet and/or interactive game. Homework: Write a town proposal for pets (scaffolding provided).
Class 8: Order of Events
Discuss order of events and narrative writing.  Put a series of events in the correct order.  Using mixed up sentences, free write to create an ordered story.  Review commonly used transition words for narrative writing.  Add transitions into our already created story.  Homework: Write a story about getting lost in a Corn Maze (scaffolding provided).
Class 9:  Character Traits
Discuss character traits and imagine traits for presented characters.  Reinforce how adding descriptive details can make a character more understandable to the reader.  Free write about a character.  Review semi-colon usage with a worksheet and/or interactive game. Homework:  Write a story about your favorite person (scaffolding provided).
Class 10: Story Mapping
Play a game to get an unusual prompt.  Discuss mapping out a story, and map our unusual prompt to create a full story.  Review transitions with a worksheet and/or interactive game. Homework:  Map a story with a fun prompt (prompt ideas and scaffolding provided).
Class 11:  How To (Expository Writing)
Discuss where we find "how to" writing.  Review various "how to" writing samples and determine what makes them good/not good.   Review order of events and good sentence structures.  Homework:  Write a "how to" essay.  (ideas and scaffolding provided).
Class 12:  Vivid Descriptions
Reinforce elements of vivid descriptions.  View photos of a natural scene and choose one to free write about.  Other students will guess which description the writer chose.  Review list 1 of commonly mixed up words with a worksheet and/or interactive game.  Homework: Turn a natural scene photo into a story (scaffolding provided).
Class 13: Using Pictures to Spark the Imagination
Play a game, using pictures, to create a silly story prompt.  Free write about the silly prompt.  Discover how students view similar prompts in different ways.  Review list 2 of commonly mixed up words with a worksheet and/or interactive game. View an interesting photo and brainstorm ideas about the underlying story.  Homework: Write the story from the interesting photo (scaffolding provided).
Class 14: Comic Strips / Dialogue
Review conversational-style comics.  Add conversation to blank comics.  Discuss how dialogue can add informal language or humor to a story.  Review short story with dialogue.  Find out more ways dialogue can add elements to a story.  Free write with a conversation starter prompt. Punctuate dialogue with a worksheet and/or interactive game.  Homework: Write a comic or dialogue 

Optional winter break homework:  Write an essay about an eternal winter (scaffolding provided).

My Teaching Philosophy:  I believe in challenging all children from whatever level they are at so that everyone is successful. I provide the opportunity for students to ask questions or get ideas when they are having difficulty.  I am a home educator with over 13 years of teaching experience with ages preschool to 12th grade.  Specifically, I have taught multiple years of Middle School and High School English (including composition, literature, and grammar).  Currently, I teach an intermediate and an advanced high school level composition/literature course at our area homeschool cooperative.  

It is my belief that even the most reluctant writers can be unlocked with the right guidance and prompting.  I have a college sophomore on the autism spectrum and a high school senior with ADHD.  Teaching them has provided me with the unique insight of how to teach children, with difficulties, to express themselves.  

What is coming next:  Semester 2 includes more types of writing, grammar review, as well as some of the foundations for the 5 paragraph essay.