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.