Explorations in Writing: Stories and Poems

Explorations in Writing: Stories and Poems is a Baby CTY course where students learn about different genres of writing. Its course code is READ. This course is offered at:

First Session: Brooklandville, San Mateo.

Course Description

From the CTY Summer Catalog:

The proverb “variety is the spice of life” captures the approach to reading and writing in this course. Exploring a rich array of stories and poems from different cultures, countries, and generations, students learn to identify literary devices and incorporate them into their own writing.

For example, students might read Verna Aardema’s Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears: A West African Tale and then write their own pourquoi tales to explain natural phenomena. They could incorporate comparison into their descriptions after observing how Marie Louise Allen effectively uses simile in her poem “First Snow,” or they could examine how Gary Soto’s short stories evoke the people and places of his childhood and base their own stories on the people and places they know best.

Class sessions are designed to allow students to experience the rich interplay of reading, writing, and conversation. For example, a morning may find students moving seamlessly from discussing an assigned story in small groups to writing reflective paragraphs to participating in independent reading of works they choose themselves. Students could also be asked to draft poems, share their poems with classmates, and participate in readers’ theater. Students leave the course with an appreciation for diverse genres and voices, as well as a sense of the many opportunities open to them as readers and writers.

Students must have completed grades: 2 or 3