Currently most of our students are working on our student run press – The Ontop Standard.  The articles are created, edited, and published exclusively by our students and run the gamut from tongue-in-cheek articles to music reviews and the occasional piece of hard-journalism.  Other students have been honing their writing craft by working on spontaneous writing assignments called “Quickwrites”.  These are one or two day long writing assignments for students who struggle with generating ideas and need a more concrete framework for tackling a writing assignment.  Some 0f our middle-school students will be working over the next few days on writing and illustrating stories for younger children using Storybird.  You can find a link to Storybird in the Friends and Links section of our web-site.

You don’t like the current situation with food here at the Taft Building and you’d like to see that changed. So, what do you do? A good place to start is to make sure that your voice is heard. If you aren’t speaking, you aren’t being listened to. The most accessible form of getting your voice out into the world is the common letter. You can start by writing a letter to the director of food services for our school district. At the very least, you know then that the person who can actually change things has heard you. Next, if you continue to feel strongly that there needs to be change, you should contact other people who might be able to make things change. The school district’s superintendent, the mayor of Burlington, local newspapers or the press, politicians such as your state and federal representatives. But, in order to be taken seriously, your letter has to look a certain way and sound as professional and polished as it can.

Lets start with the look. Visit the link below and you’ll get a walk through of the various parts of a letter. Because you want it to be professional in appearance, you should follow the guide for a business letter.

http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/letter_generator/

Good luck on your efforts to make positive change here at your school!

We have been talking about the poetic form known as an anaphora. Remember that an anaphora is the choice by a poet to repeat a word or phrase multiple times within a poem.

If you can’t remember what that looks like, try this example:  A Litany by Gregory Orr

Your writing prompt for today is to try writing an anaphora poem using the phrase “I remember…”

I know that it is hard to come crawling back to school after the freedom of a summer vacation but here we are.  I’ve worked with most of you a little on your writing while a couple of you are getting your first chance to show me what you can do.  But, before we get too far into things, I’d like to know how you feel about writing in general.  So, if you could answer the following questions, that would be great:

• Do you like to write?  Why or why not?
• What makes writing hard?
• Why do you think writing is a skill that teachers have decided is so important?
• Why do people write?
• Where are some places or situations where people have to use writing?
• Why would being able to write well be an important skill to have for a job?