Students will learn the three basic elements of writing a story: character, plot, and setting.
Students will respond to prompts relating to each of these elements and begin writing a story or scene with them. 
Students will have the option of sharing their work with peers to practice public speaking and offering constructive feedback to others.

I began working with youth and teaching English Language Arts skills, particularly writing, over ten years ago. As an undergraduate student, I began working in the Tutoring Center as a Peer Writing Assistant. It was here that I discovered my love of teaching writing, as I learned how to guide fellow students to make edits, complete revisions, and generate ideas for academic writing assignments. I took these skills as I returned to my high school as the Writer-In-Residence for a semester in 2015, instructing one-on-one and group writing lessons to Regents and AP English high school students. Upon graduating from SUNY New Paltz, I began working as a Writing Consultant at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA, and though I admittedly didn’t love living in a city, I loved working in their Student Writing Center. It was here that I worked with graduate level students, many of whom English was their second language, and gained more strategies to better assist each writer to achieve their goals. After returning to the Hudson Valley, I became an ELA Tutor at a local business, Tutor My Success, that has since closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As an English tutor there from 2019-2021, I worked one-on-one with middle and high school students to develop their reading comprehension, grammar, academic and creative writing skills. Unlike at a Writing Center where students often bring a piece of writing to work on together, I designed each lesson for my tutoring students. I found such fulfillment in creating personalized lessons to build the skills of each unique student, all the while building our relationship and their confidence in reading and writing. It was at this time in 2019 that I founded my very own creative writing group for middle and high schoolers called Mid-Hudson Youth Writers (MHYW). The group is still going strong in 2024, and as the instructor, I continue to design weekly lessons for my students to learn about and practice honing their creative writing skills. My students are a diverse group of kids who, through our time together, have bonded not only as writers, but friends. When other organizations heard about MHYW, they invited me to teach creative writing classes for them as well. I have since taught at SOAR Enrichment, EdAdvance, and several other libraries in the Hudson Valley. In addition to MHYW, I have worked most recently as a Children's Literacy Coordinator and Outreach & Events Coordinator at two local libraries in the Hudson Valley.

I seek to make my classroom space accessible to everyone by engaging in direct communication about specific needs prior to beginning a lesson and meeting those needs when possible.

Students should be confident in writing sentences and curious about writing stories.