Get Your Kids in the Write Rhythm

U-Write Creative Writing Workshops is tuning up for a fun summer camp experience!  Our guitar teacher Nick McLaughlin will be plucking the strings for our camp authors everyday for half an hour.  We'll have some spare guitars to let the kids try their hands at playing the guitar. 

Nick McLaughlin is a student at Bucks County Community College and has been playing the guitar for five years.  He's been teaching guitar at the Academy of Music and Arts in Southampton for over two years.  Nick brings youthful enthusiasm to his lessons.  The kids are sure to be enthralled by his love of music and ability to translate that into an understanding of notes and rhythm.

Studies have shown that music stimulates the learning process.  Learning music is a sure way to get the kids into the groove of writing.

We hope to see you this summer!  Please check out our schedule in the right column for camp times.

Best Wishes,

Kellyann Zuzulo

Summer Writing

You may think that writing is an individual activity, but some of our best ideas come from brainstorming.  And when the weather is fair and the sun is shining, we'll kick up our own storms.  Join U-Write this summer when we gather under the old oak tree, create characters, draw scenes, make up plots, and write down the stories hiding in our heads. 

A flying sandwich.  Check.
A little girl who digs a tunnel from her lawn to her friend's house.  Check.
Travel to a magical planet where each day is a festival.  Check.
Heroics in school hallways.  Check.

These are just some of the ideas U-Write kids have imagined, refined and formed into stories...stories that delight and amuse the class.  Writing is fun...especially in the summer when our senses come alive in the outdoors.

U-Write is perfect for kids aged 8 to 12 years.  We'll break into age-appropriate groups during the second half of our sessions.  For our fifth- and sixth-graders, we'll focus on the the proper way to write an essay in form and structure that will make them shine when admissions time rolls around.

We'll have fun water games, playacting, and running around in the backyard so we can write notes while we're still breathless with the feeling.  Writing is all about observing and experiencing.

Come on out!!  We'll be looking for you under the old oak tree.

~Kellyann Zuzulo

Children's Writers Workshop

U-Write starts up with an exciting new session this September.  We've had lots of young authors join us and share their wonderful stories.  Personally, I've been amazed by the creativity and ease with which these kids draw worlds with their words.

There will be some fun revisions to the new session.  Check out the list below for the topic that will be covered each of the eight weeks.  But, this time, we'll spend more time focused on each child's story, who their characters are, what makes the unbelievable believable, and the best way to keep a reader engaged. 

By the end of the eight weeks, your child will have a fully developed fiction story, one that might even find a suitable outlet in the print or online publishing community.

And, yes, sometimes we even hold class under the big tree in the back where we brainstorm and imagine worlds.

Please join us.

Welcome to U-Write

U-Write is an exciting, real-time writing program for kids in grades 2 through 6, held at the Academy of Music and Arts in Southampton, PA. Your child will learn the skills, structure and craft of creating stories, in the form of books, articles, journals, and letters. Each week, we'll be doing fun activities and interactive exercises that will shape our future authors, journalists, and wordsmiths.

Any path your child chooses is paved by words. U-Write will help your young writers excel on those chosen paths. This course provides the information and hands-on work your child can use to create his or her own Do-It-Yourself Manual on Managing Imagination.

The first half hour of class each week will explore a technique for sharing words, whether through interviews, storytelling, letter writing, or simple observation of the world around us. The last 15 minutes of each class will be dedicated to adding to our ongoing fiction tales. By the end of the eight weeks, your child will not only be a more enthusiastic writer, but will be an author with a unique story to tell.


The U-Write Curriculum
Week One: Journal Writing
Every memoir starts with a journal. U-Write provides each child with a journal on the first day of class. Thoughts, impression, sentences, or scenes can be added during the ensuing weeks at the child's pace. A headshot of your child will be taken during the first class that can be pasted into the journal to personalize it.
Week Two: Reporting/ Interviewing
We will take turns interviewing each other and will learn the basic elements of how to draw a story out of our subject...a skill that every good reporter needs. We will also do some exercises in observation and learn how to use our senses to tell our stories.
Week Three: Storytelling
It Takes One Sentence ...cooperative storytelling that's sure to get lots of giggles. We start with one sentence and each child adds to the story. We will also explore folktales and learn about the oral tradition of sharing stories.

Week Four: The Rewrite
Every good writer needs to be their own best critic. We'll learn how to 'clean up' our copy, with some basic grammar tips and copyediting marks.


Week Five: Letter Writing
The art of the letter is not lost. For this class, each child will write a letter to someone special, address an envelope and mail it off. We'll also discuss some of the differences between letter writing and e-mail notes, which your child may already be exploring.

Week Six: Observation
We have five senses and it's important for all writers to use all of them. We'll step outside for this fun class of describing the world around us in a way that places our readers right in the images we see.


Week Seven: It's All About Me
We'll revisit the concept of interviewing, but this time, the child will be her own subject. Tying in the idea of observation, we'll discuss how important it is to keep our five senses ever present in everything we write: how we feel, what we see and smell, taste, and hear. [At the end of this class, I'll take the children's journals home in order to type up their stories and hand them back to them for the final week of class and a very special author reading.]


Week Eight: Once Upon A Time
At the beginning of this class, the children will be given their completed fiction stories, packaged as their own individual pamphlet. We'll go over some of the images we created. In the last 15 minutes, we'll invite parents to join us as our authors read from their books.