Sample Curriculum

          Tutorials and workshops will be held in one to three hour sessions. Each one will be fitted to the writer's unique learning and writing style. For me to better assess this style, it is recommended that the writer brings a writing sample with them to the tutorial, whether it be a piece of creative or academic writing, story or essay. From there, the curriculum will be as follows:
 

Academic
-> The Awesome Sentence Vs. The Caveman Sentence and the Yawn Sentence
-> The Exciting Intro Vs. The Sleepy Intro
-> Spicing Things Up: Adjectives, Commas, and Cliffhangers
-> Organizing a Paper Before Writing it
-> Self-Editing Techniques
-> Spicing Things Up II: Metaphors, Similes, Analogies
-> Structuring Thoughts into the Five-Paragraph Form
-> *Researching and Organizing Information
-> *MLA: No Fear Bibliographies
-> *MLA: No Fear Parenthetical References and Footnotes
-> *Using and Creating Researched Material
-> *College Essays
-> A Finished Five-Paragraph Essay. (don't worry, this will be fun!)

Creative
-> The Awesome Sentence Vs. The Caveman Sentence and the Yawn Sentence
-> The Exciting Intro Vs. The Sleepy Intro
-> Building Characters: Brain Exercises!
-> Making Characters Talk: Commas, Quotes, and Dialogue
-> Making Characters Think: Personalities and Inner Conflicts
-> Building Settings: Brain Exercises!
-> Painting Settings: Adjectives, Metaphors, and Similes
-> Bringing Settings to Life and Putting Characters in Them
-> Building Plots: Brain Exercises!
-> Self-Editing Techniques
-> What is Style?
-> First and Third Person Narration
-> *Peer-to-Peer Editing, Constructive Criticism
-> A Finished Short Story or Poem.

Details...
          There are no time limits to any item on the rubric. There are no grades, mandatory homework assignments, or stern glances. For younger writers, we will learn and grow together. We will look at Dr. Seuss books and Harry Potter books to see what works and what makes them good. For older writers, we will write and edit together. We can speed through some exercises to get to other ones, then spend more time on those to become really good at them.
        All items are optional, but Starred (*) items are super-optional.

Brain Exercises           
         Ideas are the fundamental part of writing. One of the most unique features of the Think Write program is its approach to building these ideas. To build characters, we will look at books, TV shows, drawings, pictures, legos, and more. Then, we will change a character or replace a character and think about what happens and why it happens.
         What if Harry Potter was a girl? What if Spongebob got really mean one day? What if Frodo became evil from the One Ring? If we draw pictures or build legos, we can wonder: who is this dragon and does he have a family? Who is this lego man and where did he come from? From here, we will build our own characters. 
          We will use similar approaches to build settings. We will look at the settings of books, TV shows, drawings, pictures, and legos  and imagine them in completely different worlds, places, and time periods. We will try to put our newly made characters into all sorts of areas, whether we put them in Hogwarts or Bikini Bottom or put them in the forest we see in a picture or drawing.
        Plots will be made by drawing on these resources as well. We will come up with alternate endings to exisitng shows and books while imagining the situations that brought a photographer to the top of a mountain or one of our lego men into a lego jungle. Even using everyday observations, we can make a story: what if a rip in a shirt is not from a tree branch but from a tiger?
       Think Write is about writing, but it is also about drawing and building and, above all, thinking. The brain is like a muscle and these brain exercises will make our brains very, very strong.