Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Why Create a Curriculum?

Dynamic, Every Day Writing came out of a desire to teach writing materials I enjoyed to students I loved. I wanted to teach writing classes in a way that made sense to me as a writer, a teacher, and a parent. 

As a writer, I have found that many writing lessons feel stifling to me. As a teacher, I wish to encourage my students to make creative decisions with their words and to empower them with measurable, objective skills. As a parent, I just wanted a writing curriculum that my home-schooled daughters would enjoy using. 

With a B.A. degree in Secondary Education and English, along with several years of experience teaching my own home-schooled daughters and classes at a local home-school co-operative, I decided to write my own curriculum.


My own studies into the craft of writing and the craft of teaching writing gave me insights into the process of writing and the process of teaching writing. 

My experiences as a writer of published poetry, short stories, articles, and novels has given me a unique perspective on the ebb and flow of the writing process as a daily, yearly, and life-long journey.

My experience teaching at home and in home-school classes gave me a sense of how a variety of students react to writing and writing lessons. 

Dynamic, Every Day Writing is a study that involves both informal and formal writing practice, multiple drafts, essays, fiction, poetry, and business writing.

At this point, I have published Dynamic Writing 1, a full course curriculum of 161 lessons for middle school students. Within the next two years, I will complete Dynamic Writing 2 and Dynamic Writing 3 for publication. Currently, both of those curricula exist as small, private print runs and handouts. They simply need proofreading, copy-editing, and formatting. Of course, there is nothing simple about the last steps of publishing a book. Sometimes, those steps take the most time.

If you are looking for a writing curriculum that encompasses both creative and logical skill sets, please consider Dynamic Writing 1