Writers design Christmas Cards. A limited collection will be on sale during the AES Christmas Auction!

In preparation for the upcoming AES Christmas Auction, younger members of the Becoming a Writer club are designing Christmas Cards. They hope to sell their limited collection and look forward to see how their modest literary contribution makes a difference. The cards will be composed of images - Nativity scenes, and, of course, words! Composed of what kind of words? Well, you can surely expect top-shelf words, like: shepherd, Nativity, halo, incense, myrrh and more... The cards will be signed by their authors! 

One of the postcards will be based on Chagall's Nativity

A painstaking moment for all fiction writers - coming up with a plot!

5th and 6th grade writers are now in the moment of moving on from carrying out specific writing exercises to writing their actual short stories. In fact, they are now in the most crucial and creative stage of coming up with story plots. This task, however, is not simple. It's often discouraging and not at all spectacular!

They are creating plots that are to grab their readers' attention, bringing to life real and interesting characters, coming up with suspenses and satisfactory or unexpected endings. They are choosing, often subconsciously, their modes of expression - some choose realism, some fantasy, others horror...

Mapping out story plots...
can be a struggle!

Soon, their current brainstorming will take on a shape of actual literary forms - short stories that, at the end of this school year, will be published in form of an anthology. Just as it happened last year.

3rd grade writers respond to another famous painting

C. D. Friedrich Wandarer above the sea of fog

During our last Becoming a Writer workshop, 3rd grade students put themselves in the shoes of the wandarer from Friedrich's painting. This is what they saw and felt:

"It looks Russian because the colors are cold."

"The sky reminds my of vapour from behind a plane."

"It is so cold that it makes my mind cold."

"The rocks in the water look like sharks in the sea."

Transforming a painting onto words

One of the most famous paintings - Monet's Sunrise has been transformed by 3rd and 4th grade AES students into words. The young writers are on the right track to understand that painting, music or writing are just different ways for expressing something. They begin seeing that words are like a palatte with drops of paint - the more colors a painter has, the more interesting pictures he can create. And, parallel to that, the more words a writer knows, the greater his literary images. 

Monet's Sunrise in painting

Monet's Sunrise in words