Saturday, October 9, 2010

Story Club: A Young Writers' Group

Inspired by a homeschooling (cyber) friend, and by my desire to support George in his creative writing this year, I decided to start a young writers' group. We had our first meeting Thursday, and so far so good!

The idea is this: once a month the kids will pick a genre out of a hat, and will have all month to write a story in that genre. At the meeting, they'll be encouraged to read the story they've written (plus anything else they've written that month and want to share). Hopefully these readings will generate some discussion and further thought. We'll also play some writing games, especially the one where each person writes down two sentences of a new story, and then passes the paper to the person on their left, who adds two sentences of their own, etc. etc., until everyone ends up with the story they began, which they then finish off, and then read to the group. (Does that game have a name?!)

For the first meeting, I decided we should have a discussion about genres--I wanted the kids to list as many genres as they could think of, and then go down the list together and discuss what each one was (and maybe give some examples), and then decide which 8 suggested ones should make it onto our final list. I wanted the number to be 8, because there will be 8 subsequent meetings, and I want each kid to have a chance to write a story in each genre over the course of the year.

George and I had talked a lot about this in advance, and had come up with several genres ahead of time, in case the discussion stalled out. We needn't have worried. Our little group (5 kids including George, though at least 4 more are planning on coming next time) had plenty of ideas! Most of the time I just acted as scribe and tried to stay out of their way, as they really were off and running.

The 8 genres they settled on are: action/adventure, comedy, tall tales/mythology, plays/graphic novels/poetry, memoir/autobiography, historical fiction, science fiction/fantasy, and horror/mystery. You'll notice there are a lot of compound categories; this is partly because it was hard to narrow it down to 8 and partly because the kids wanted to offer flexibility in some of the categories (for example, several of them were very enthusiastic about including poetry, but one or two of the kids weren't so thrilled about that. Ditto for plays. So they decided those genres should be combined with graphic novels, so no one would have to feel forced to write a poem or a play).

After we had our list, we turned our attention to the game. I've played this game with my intermediate and advanced language students at the university (in Italian, of course), and it's always great fun and often quite hilarious. What I didn't really anticipate was that some of the kids would feel kind of uncomfortable with the direction in which the other kids took their stories! I guess they were feeling quite invested in the stories that they had begun ("I can't *believe* Indiana Jones ended up getting eaten by a shark!"--uttered with great dismay). So if I had it to do over again, I would explain that aspect a little better before starting, and prepare them for the fact that they would have no control over where the story went once they passed it on (but that if they had in mind a particular progression for the story, they could always write that story themselves later). In any case, I explained that at the end, and they were all pretty much ok with it at that point. They seemed to be able to let go and embrace the creativity and whimsy and humor of it. There was definitely much laughter when the end products were read aloud.

Then it was time to pick their genres for the month. We also decided that each month we'd highlight one genre, and the kids would each find a book to read in the highlighted genre to come back and report on/discuss with each other next time. Probably, if we do the story-writing activity again, they'll try to make their composite stories be in that month's highlighted genre.

Overall, it went even better than I had hoped. The kids seemed to have a great time, and seem excited about it. And I'm excited about it, too. It was deeply rewarding watching these kids interact with one another and work together. It was also, quite frankly, highly entertaining, as there are some very sharp wits in the group.

Sitting at the table with the kids, and thinking about it afterwards, I have found myself feeling the way I've been feeling a lot so far this year: kind of surprised and very happy that we really have managed to find or create so much of what I once feared that George would miss out on by being homeschooled. He has plenty of friends. And he is in plenty of group situations with other kids where he gets to work in all different kinds of ways: small- and large-group projects; independent projects that are later shared; more academic enterprises like Story Club, and more recreational ones; groups with very rigid rules and structure (such as Tae Kwon Do), and groups with no stated rules at all (weekly playgroup).... I really don't see that he's missing out on any of the good things. I'm so glad that we've found our way here, and that we can make it work.

A few pics: