Lake Erie Ink Dives Deep with a Year-Long Residency at CMSD’s Mary McLeod Bethune School
As an integral part of its mission, Lake Erie Ink works closely with teachers and schools to enhance writing instruction and help kids build literacy skills through creative projects. This year, Cynthia Larsen, co-founder and Curriculum Director, visited classrooms at Mary McLeod Bethune School throughout the 2015-2016 school year to facilitate professional development for teachers and writing workshops for students. Together, they explored a range of topics, including figurative and sensory language, characterization, point of view, poetry, and more.
The 3rd through 5th graders started the year working on narrative fiction, learning the difference between nonfiction and fiction and between realistic and unrealistic fiction. The culminating project was a collection of “Impossible Stories” of speculative or “unrealistic” fiction.
The 6th through 8th graders worked on personal narrative during the fall and then on a variety of projects in the winter that focused on responding to literature and writing arguments or claims. Among these, they created “Pro Con Comics” where they explored their reasons for asserting a claim and anticipated the opposition’s argument. The comics were then used to develop an argumentative letter.
In the spring, the students honed their descriptive writing skills by embracing poetry and collaborative writing.
Lake Erie Ink’s in-school programs, such as this, use creative writing to address the state’s education standards and motivate students to write more and better and build skills, confidence, enthusiasm and facility at writing. “Through these activities, scholars were not only able to strengthen their writing skills but learn to take pride and ownership in their work,” said Mary Bethune principal Melanie Nakonachny.
Check out some of the Mary McLeod Bethune students amazing work here.