Sunday, April 22, 2007
Iles school – Writer's conference - Springfield, Illinois
I was invited to participate in Iles school’s fourth annual writers’ conference on Friday, April 20 2007. The theme of the conference was “Writing Is Out of This World”. The purpose was to enable children to become excited about being both writers and readers. I spoke to 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade classes, six classes all together. My remarks were about the purpose, structure, and elements of a story. Iles school is for gifted children. The children were very bright and witty. All had a sense of what writing was about in terms of a story has a beginning, middle and end. It has character, plot and conflict. I was very impressed with their knowledge, their expression, ideas and structure of thought. They were full of energy, with bright eyes and excitement on their faces. I really enjoyed interacting with them. It was a great experience sharing time with such hopes for the future.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Sounds like you had a wonderful time... do you have the kids write essays? What are the subjects on? I'm very curious about this.
P.S., I'm a friend of Susan.
I did have a wonderful time. I only had a half-hour in six classes, so I didn't feel like they had time to write essays. Now that I am thinking about it, having them write something after I left for their teachers to review would have been interesting, even more have them send their papers to me. Thoughts for next time.
I tried to be interactive with them talking about story elements. Such as perspective, people write about dragons what would a dragon write about people (interestingly most thought dragons would write about eating people); How could different enitities like a fish in water and a bee in the air communication (they were very creative, like flying fish to carry messages into the air).
I was surprised at the number that have read books of the movies they liked and enjoyed the book more. Something of couse a author loves to hear. They realized reading a book you could become the character, see through the character's eyes, hear through the character's ears, understand the character's thinking that turns into action. Be in the story.
Post a Comment