Arizona Commission on the Arts: Residency Roster

Judith Clayton Van

School Based Residency Plan: Fourth grade and older.

Lesson One: Overview: "What is a story?" Read and write "sudden fiction." Assignment: Create a character. Begin a journal. Write about what you love.

Lesson Two: Character. Assignment: Show character in action. Reading: Characters in action, e.g. Madame Bovary at the piano, Huck Finn escaping from the cabin, Antonia working in the field.

Lesson Three: Dialogue. Introduce a second character. Have characters interact. What do they say? How do they sound? Listen to taped conversations. Activity: Students read each others dialogue.

Lesson Four: Point of View and Plot. Who is telling your story and why? What does your point of view character see? What happens?

Lesson Five: How do you end a story? How do you want your audience to feel? Assignment: Complete the story, give it an ending.

Lesson Six: Student reading. Each student chooses a passage or scene of her/his story to read in class. Or class can choose scenes from stories and preform them, either by giving a reading, showing video, or "acting them out".

Leson Seven: Rewriting/re-seeing workshop: "How to edit a story." Assignment: Start a new story based on story number one.

Lesson Eight: Review elements we've discussed. "The Power of Words." Discussion of the power of words, of sounds. Tape students as they listen to and/or play music, beat drums, sing a song together. Play the tape back to them. Next play tapes of famous poets reading. Discuss how sounds and rhythm work together with the word to convey meaning. Discuss the power of words to changes things and people. Apply to stories.

Lesson Nine: "How details can help your story." When and why one uses detail, when and why to leave it out. Students read examples of their work focusing on character. Students write anonymous love notes to fictional characters. They cite specific details from the story to illustrate how they formed an affection for the character.

Lesson Ten: "Courage and the process of journal writing." Why do you write? What does writing do for you? Using your journal in your creative writing. Class discussion based on the stories in progress.

Lesson Eleven: Students bring clean draft of new story. Discuss sentences and how to make them work harder for your story. Review of revision and editing. Workshop: Re-visiting the story.

Lesson Twelve: "The habit of writing." The process of art and what it can mean to you. Students may choose to share their material in one of two ways. They may bring materials and make a book or broadside as a final project, or they may read from their journals and/or stories.

 

J