I found a project through Twitter for teaching students to think like a filmmaker. The project, for grades 6 to 8, is written by Judy Storm Fink and is published at the NCTE website, readwritethink.org. The project title is You Know the Movie is Coming—Now What?. This is a complex project with lots of supplementary material. As […]
Teaching Detail in Creative Writing by Kids: Observational Writing
In the Collected Maxims of the German writer, W. G. Sebald (1944 –2001), he is credited with offering this advice to writers: ‘Significant detail’ enlivens otherwise mundane situations. You need acute, merciless observation. Observation provides a foundation on which writers can build. It is, of course, not observation alone that makes Shakespeare or Dickens or Melville […]
Historic Photography by Kids
The Kodak box camera, first produced in the 1880s, became the iconic camera for the amateur photographer. The camera was as easy to use as our phone camera’s. Point and shoot. Even a child could do it. And even children did. Photograph by Anne Burrow, age 13, 1914 The best source of historic photographic images […]
