On Saturday, April 26, I went to the Young Writers’ Conference. It was a big deal for me because I got to meet tons of amazing authors like Nicole Luiken, Jhan Groom, and Eric Walters. I learned so much about writing and creating different worlds and stories.
Writing has helped me so much because creating a new world, where I could escape from reality, helped me discover I wanted to be an author and what reading and writing could help me through. I love writing because writing literally helps you through everything. If you don’t have someone to talk to about your day, write it in a journal. If you are a songwriter and have some lyrics or notes to remember, write them down.
I love doing creative things like writing and drawing because, besides spelling and grammar, there aren’t any rules. You can color outside the lines if you want to, you can rewrite history if you want to.
Writing may be simple, but it’s a powerful skill that helps you to invent and create new things. Writing helps me express myself, and I think writing can do the same for so many people.
By writing, I’ve found out I want people to read my stories and see the world differently. Not just as the way it is, but by taking something, and making something new out of it. In real life, when you are talking to someone, you can’t create a new world. With writing, you can give a cup of lemonade wings, you can change the course of history. One of your stories will affect and change the future, and not just in writing, but in reality. If you write about what you want most, you just might find out how to get there.
You never have to stop writing - you don’t need a happy ending.
Because “to be continued…” is way more fun!!!
Kennedy is a grade four student at Twelve Mile Coulee School. She enjoys writing stories and reading science fiction.
2 Comments
A Universe of Possibilities! Students as Explorers, Researchers and Teachers We can all be explorers, from our classrooms or from anywhere! Meaningful learning happens when teachers and students alike take risks in learning, and have a willingness to try new things, reflect, and repeat. No matter where you are as a learner, research is always more than collecting facts. In our Grade 6 class, we used tools like Instagrok to engage learners so they could focus on process - synthesizing and connecting ideas, rather than taking notes or worrying about proper citations. And learning is more than just knowing what to do - what’s important is knowing how to learn! In this student-directed inquiry work, students considered and mapped the possibilities that could emerge from “juicy questions”, and only then, when every student had found a research connection they could deeply connect with, did we collaboratively map it back to outcomes in the curriculum. The powerful capstone of this work was that students recognized that they were teachers, too. The true meaning of teaching and learning came out through sharing and celebrating. Some of the ways we’ve done this were:
See more of our work, discuss, comment, revise and share through our resource in CORE. David Cloutier (@DavidCloutier) is a student teacher from @MountRoyal4U (and a part of the @CBEILT team) team teaching with Lynne Ursenbach (@LynneUrsenbach), a Learning Leader, at Willow Park School. Both are passionate about empowering students to explore and to create together, build off the work of others, and consider the impact they can have along their learning journeys. At Arbour Lake School we are focused on integrated, exploratory, challenging and relevant learning. Students in grade nine use a simulation called Civic Mirror to turn their classroom into a nation with its own laws, government and market. Citizens from the nations of Kartoshka (yes, their country name means “potato” in Russian!) and Raspberia recently wrote letters to their Prime Minister, offering suggestions as to how to improve their countries’ economic and social standing. While this was going on, Arbour Lake was also participating in We Are Silent, in which students and staff refrained from speaking in order to honour individuals around the world who lack the freedom to speak for themselves. The idea of learning business letter format without speaking was initially daunting, but we decided to see if the new Google Apps for Education suite could address some of those challenges. We created business letter exemplars in Google Docs and then used the comment tool to pose guiding questions for students to consider and “discuss” electronically. Students then wrote their own letters to the Prime Minister following the provided example, and sought feedback from their classmates by digitally sharing their work with trusted peers. By the end of a single lesson students had raised money for, and awareness of, people without the right to free speech, participated actively in their nation’s democratic process and learned how to write a business letter. Not bad for one morning, hey? Carly Lutzmann (@MsLutzmann) is a grade nine teacher at Arbour Lake School and a graduate student in Educational Leadership & Management at Royal Roads University.
|
Do you want to get an email notification of all new posts? Enter your address below!
Archives
November 2017
Categories
All
|