Writing Workshop

This year we’re hosting our 47th annual write and illustrate contest for kids. Each year kids in grades Kindergarten – 8th grade submit their own stories that they written and illustrated and the winners in each grade have their books professionally bound and added to our collection. What’s really great is that we have books that have been written by teachers in our school district who get to show them off every year. And we’ve even had adults reach out to us as parents asking to have their books scanned so they can read them to their little ones.

With this contest, we’ve also hosted a writing workshop, which we hosted as a virtual program this past week. This is a program that can be easily done in person or online which is really great when creating programs to be flexible is so vital right now. We did ask families to register for the program and stop by the library to pick up the writing workshop worksheets.

Program Details

The program was really easy to host – we talked about the different types of writing that we can do – nonfiction vs. fiction, genres, and formats. Then we talked about all the parts of a story we need to have to create a really great story:

• plot
• characters
• setting
• conflict/resolution
• point of view

Then we started working on our worksheets. I really wanted the kids to spend time brainstorming ideas – pushing them to write down as many ideas as they can, before selecting their favorite. With simple prompts like thinking about your favorites or things you like to do to start brainstorming, the kids did a great job of pulling together a lot of ideas.

Next, I had the kids select their favorite idea and brainstorm more aspects of their story – creating a character, setting, maybe thinking about conflict, etc.

The kids were super excited to share their ideas and I gave the kids a chance to comment and suggest ideas to each other. And they were so kind to each other! It was so nice to see them really providing constructive feedback to each other. I never force a kid to share or respond. I was the kid who never wanted to raise my hand, so I’m always conscious of quiet kids.

Review

Although the program went really well, I really needed a lot more time. This program was only 45-minutes long and I could have easily used twice the amount of time. I gave the kids an overview of the other worksheets, but we didn’t even get to those pages at all.

I also wanted to spend a little bit more time sharing The Three Little Pigs as an example of writing. Then I briefly shared The True Story of the Three Little Pigs to talk about the perspective of the characters. I really wanted to spend more time with this concept, but as I said, we were short on time.