Homeschool Writing Course for 7-Year Old Leads to Published Book
By Sun Kyu Bae |
Published May 14, 2010 |
Articles |
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It's easier than you think to have your child's book resting on her own bookshelf!
Ryan's Writing Course Curriculum
The Young Novelist Workbook, which is a PDF file that contains a series of planning and writing exercises customized for elementary, middle, or high school students, helped us build our writing course for Ryan. Specifically, here is the lesson plan for the writing course:
Lesson 1 - What Makes a Great Novel. This is a simple discussion on what factors makes a novel great and not so great. I thought this was a great introduction to helping Ryan understand novels by breaking them down into their main building blocks.
Lesson 2 - How to Create Awesome Characters. This lesson included a discussion on what makes interesting characters followed up by an opportunity for Ryan to create his own main, supporting, and villain characters. Creating the characters first was a fresh way for Ryan to learn how to develop his story.
Lesson 3 - Making the Story. Rather than going straight into the plot, this lesson is a discussion on the motivations and fear of your characters as well as the challenges that they will face while identifying how your main character will defeat the villain. Ryan then used the worksheets provided in the workbook to complete this information for his story.
Lesson 4 - Outline the Plot. Can you believe it? After 3 lessons, Ryan finally got his chance to write the plot. But before that, we gave him the discussion on the elements of a plot. The workbook does a fantastic job in illustrating that a good plot should run like a roller coaster ride, with a calm and descriptive beginning, to an exciting event that causes rising action, then leading to climax and falling action, concluding with an ending. This discussion ensured that Ryan included these elements in his own plot.
Lesson 5 - The Setting. This lesson discussed the importance of a good setting. After all, the setting sets the tone for the entire story. Ryan had a chance to include some good descriptive elements to this story to help the reader see the setting from Ryan's eyes.
Lesson 6 - Dialogue. This lesson covered the subject of what makes a great dialogue. Ryan also learned that the objective of a dialogue was to move the story forward and so should be written to meet that objective.
Lessons 7 Through Completion - Write Your Story. Wow. Although we thought the lessons were helpful, by the time we actually told Ryan we could now start writing his story, he was really chomping at the bit! But boy were we glad we went through these lessons first because it brought out so much detail and depth to Ryan's story. Ryan wrote for about 20-30 minutes a day for about 30 days to complete his story.
As expected, by the time Ryan finished his story, it was early January. We counted up the words in his story and guess what? He wrote more than 2,000 words (40 pages double-spaced)!
After we printed out his Participant Certificate, we wondered what we should do with his story, because it did feel special since this was the best story he ever wrote. Well, there was a solution to that, too, on the National Novel Writing Month's website.
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