Every week is a new lesson--drop in whenever and stay as long as you like! This class is low stakes and very accessible. This is a great class for students who are either highly creative or reluctant writers (or both!). If students stay for multiple weeks, they will walk away with tried and true writing techniques. 

A typical class is as follows, although the structure sometimes changes: We begin class with a short reading for inspiration. Then we spend 5-15 minutes doing some freewriting and letting the ideas flow. After that, I teach a certain writing strategy and students have time to revise their writing, or add on to it, using the day's strategy.  

Usually we share some or all of our writing --sometimes at the end of class and sometimes throughout the class-- and I take volunteers who might want to share certain excerpts from their writing with the whole class.  

We will explore poetry, story writing, and more. Students may write in a notebook or on a word processing app. 

If students want continued writing instruction, they can sign up for my one-on-one tutoring sessions: https://outschool.com/classes/private-one-on-one-writing-tutoring-aZLyhkrlusid=CikmsyzL&signup=true&utm_campaign=share_activity_link  

The following is the weekly schedule, subject to change: 

Week 1- Defeating Writer’s Block Part 1: Mind-Mapping 
Week 2- Defeating Writer’s Block Part 2: 4-Square Writing Method 
Week 3- Defeating Writer’s Block Part 3: Question Charts 
Week 4- Understanding the Importance of Perspective 
Week 5- Scenario to Story Writing 
Week 6- Adding Sensory Details  
Week 7- Adding More Sensory Details 
Week 8- Creating Characters 
Week 9- Developing a Plot 
Week 10- Experiments in Dialogue 
Week 11- Exploring Poetry: Couplets, Haikus, and Free-Verse Poems 
Week 12- Narrative Poetry 
Week 13- Using Visualization 
Week 14- Figurative Language Styles for Creativity 
Week 15- Playing with Word Choice 
Week 16- Interesting Hooks 
Week 17- How to Learn from the Masters 

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:

📚 JESSICA BUNCH, WRITER AND TEACHER: Jessica is an expert writing teacher who inspires students to spend their lives pursuing their curiosities and passions, as she does. She is a freelance writer, an intercultural competence researcher, curriculum developer, and founder/program director of the cultural education social enterprise OneWorld Stories. Her passion for teaching sparked from her own educational journey. As a student, she had to figure out how to excel with learning disabilities that she did not know she had until later in life during adulthood. She knows what it’s like to struggle with learning and knows how to make advanced concepts easy and accessible. She believes brains and fingerprints have something in common—they are both one of a kind and extremely unique to every individual. Her approach to teaching sets this belief at the forefront. She helps students find how they best learn as unique individuals, so that they can feel confident and successful. Jessica’s desire to teach students how to find their inner writer blossoms from her life-long love of writing. She loves introducing students to the wonderful world of writing and reading in a fun, stress-free, and interactive way. Through nonprofit OneWorld Stories that she founded, she connects two classrooms from different parts of the world together to learn about each other's culture while students work as a team to write and illustrate a children’s book. Thus far, she has taught the intercultural competence and creative writing curriculum she developed (SEEME) in schools located in the United States, Kenya, Uganda, India, and El Salvador and led the publication of three OneWorld Stories children’s books. She is an explorer of the world and started international traveling when she was eight. She received her B.A. from The Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi, majoring in English and minoring in Education. She also took graduate classes in curriculum development at Colorado Christian University and social entrepreneurship at the University for Peace. She enjoys hiking, gravel and mountain biking, snowboarding, collecting vinyl records and typewriters, reading, initiating dance parties in the kitchen with her two dogs and fiancé, and embracing her obsession with notebooks and traditional pen-to-paper writing by designing and selling FigLemon Notebooks.