Students learn to paint visual images, moods and feelings with the brush strokes of language, sound, rhythm, and placement on the page.
- to encourage students to experiment with language
- to help them see things in new and imaginative ways
- and, to broaden their sense of the possibilities of thewritten work
The curriculum for all grades maintains a balance among writing, reading, and discussion. Well-known works by key authors are included. Students react constructively to each others' writing as critiquing terms are mastered reading aloud to share their work, and learning to be listeners in the sharing process.
The early poetry units guarantee young, unsure students will produce poems before they even have a chance to object that they cannot do so. Their surprise at the enjoyment of writing spurs them on to try a variety of exercises: memory poems, becoming-an-object poems, acrostics, haiku and tanka, visual (concrete) poems, sestinas, sound poems, found poems, riddles, questions and answer poems, rhymes versus free verse, translation from unknown languages to focus on the tones that sound conveys, dual-language poems, prose poems, poems using repetition, images,
simile, metaphor, alliteration, and so on.
In the fiction units, the students learn to make characters, invent plots, describe place settings, handle point of view, show through action rather than tell, write dialogue that defines the speakers or gives the readers needed information and try experimental fiction which defies traditional notions of time, place, and language.