Inspire kids to write creatively in their day to day lives
Kids need to write creatively to learn how to express themselves, which is why I created my gold award project.
Goals
My Gold Award
For my girl scout gold award, I wanted to find a way to encourage and inspire young writers. Through a lot of brainstorming, thought, and help, I came up with the idea for WritersBlock!, a writing workshop for kids ages 9-18 who want to learn how to write creatively. Each month we focused on a different genre. Below, I will showcase some of the topics and writing done by the students. This project isn’t finished yet, but I think its making quite an impact on these kids.
My first meeting was science-fiction. I had a local author, Adam Green come and talk to the kids about his writing process for his book, Conduit. The kids really seemed to enjoy this meeting and had a lot of questions for Mr. Green. During this meeting, we discussed what makes up a science-fiction story. Some of the things that we discussed were having a futuristic setting that is obviously fiction but still a believable and realistic outcome, and then having futuristic and advanced technology that goes far beyond what we currently have, and/or space travel and exploration. Science fiction also usually contains elements of action and adventure.
The second meeting was our poetry meeting. We talked about the different time periods of poetry such as Romanticism, Dark Romanticism, Contemporary, and Modern. The kids wrote tons of poems about different topics and time periods and explored many different types of poetry. First, we did some spine poetry, which is where you stack books so that the spine forms a poem. Then we did some freestyle poetry, where they wrote their own poetry based on any topic they wanted to. The third type of poetry we explored was blackout poetry, where you take a page of a book and black out all of the words on the page that you don’t want for your poem. The last form of poetry we worked on was popcorn poetry which is where each member of the meeting came up with a line of the poem.
below, you can click the links to watch videos of some of the people in attendance to the meetings reading some of their poems.
For the third meeting, we focused on realistic fiction. I had author McKenzie Connelly talk to the kids about her book Hannah Helps the Homeless; including what her inspiration was, her motivation, and how she overcame different obstacles. During this meeting, we talked about what makes realistic fiction the genre that it is. We talked about how to develop a realistic setting, how to make your characters relatable, and how to have realistic problems and solutions. We also discussed how to pick a topic to write about. When writing realistic fiction, it helps to base it off of a topic that you feel very passionate about and can relate to, like how McKenzie was talking about how she wrote her book based off of her experiences volunteering.
