Middle School Summer Camp Opportunity: Young Writers' Workshop at NCSU

If your middle schoolers gets really inspired after participating in the Teen Poetry Contest in my earlier post, then NC State University has a summer camp that might be right up their alley.  The Young Writers' Workshop, sponsored by the NC State College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of English, is a two-week, nonresidential summer camp with daily afternoon activities to help students in late elementary and middle school to develop their creative writing abilities. 

The students spend two and a half hours on campus each afternoon with lessons on four different tracks:  fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and drama (each students lists their preferences, and are placed in two different areas).  Established professional writers, most of whom also teach at area colleges or high schools, give lectures, assign writing activities, put students into small groups to discuss or create something together, or work with students one-on-one on their writing. 

The students-to-teacher is kept low (a maximum of 12 students per instructor) to assure that all writers get individual attention.  The teen writers get instruction in such creative writing components as plot, character development, conflict, action, and more.  On the final day, students invite friends and families to celebrate the creativity of the group through a public reading of the work they have produced; they also get to take home a journal of work created by themselves and their peers.

The Teen Writers' Workshop costs $250, and is open to rising 4th through 8th graders.  They are now accepting applications, which require students to express what they hope to achieve through their participation as well as to submit up to two pages of their current creative writing.  The deadline for applying is Monday, June 3.

For more information, check out their website or contact the program director, Laura Giovanelli, at lbgiovan@ncsu.edu.

The Fantastic Sky Race

We've done so much art viewing in the last few days that it is going to take more than one blog post to catch up with it all!  But let's start with the most monumental piece of them all -- a 60-foot-by-21-foot piece entitled The Fantastic Sky Race.

The Fantastic Sky Race is actually 15 separate 21-foot-long banners that are adorning the sides of a concrete parking deck in downtown Raleigh (at Davie, McDowell, and Cabarrus streets, for you locals).

It was created by three young artists from the Design Program at NC State University, who won a contest run by the University and Empire Properties (the owners of the parking deck) to find a more attractive facade to the structure than the plain concrete it had for two years (originally, it was to abut other buildings so that it wouldn't be seen, but the other building plans were put on hold due to the poor economic conditions).

Here are the three artists, who have named themselves The Balloon Boys, and who had to devote tremendous hours to completing this work on top of their normal course load and part-time jobs:

In the banner, all sorts of man-made contraptions and fantastical animals are flying through the skies above varied environments, from coastal or aquatic settings through arboreal climates, over icy tundras and warm-colored deserts.   However, also hidden amongst the drawing are at least a dozen references to the Triangle area and/or North Carolina.  For example, see if you can spot the distinctive Raleigh landmark in the details of this picture (you can click on the picture to enlarge it):

To get a better idea of the piece, watch this movie about the project from NCSU:



Wake County students will be hearing lots more about this project, because the County Library system is going to be doing programming around this imaginative theme for the next two years.  Look for announcements about art and poetry contests and presentations by the artists, which should be coming soon from our local libraries!

The Great Raleigh Trolley Adventure

This has really been a fabulous week, because I got to have another special experience this evening.  The keynote speaker at our summer conference on Teaching Your Middle Schooler, Dr. Candy Beal from NC State University who specializes in middle school education, invited me to join her graduate students on an event she does every year, The Great Raleigh Trolley Adventure.

Those who attended the conference know what a great speaker Candy Beal is.  Tonight I got to see her more in her role as university professor, demonstrating to her students what it is to be an exceptional teacher.

The contents of The Great Raleigh Trolley Adventure is around 20 people in a trolley-style bus traveling all around downtown Raleigh and learning about the history of various sites in the city.  The context of the tour, however, is Candy's belief that teachers need to learn about and be actively visible in the community that they end up teaching in to help demonstrate their commitment to and credibility within that community.  Another contextual aspect to the trip is Candy's assertion that middle schoolers are particularly concerned about two questions:

• Who am I?
• What is my place in the world?

Candy says that for most middle schoolers, the latter question about place revolves around four important components of students' lives:  their family, their school, their peers, and their community.  So another point about an activity like The Great Raleigh Trolley Adventure, according to Candy, is to help middle schoolers find a place in their community as "keepers of history" by knowing and understanding the evolution of their area.

I think those are really important points for us all to keep in mind, whether we are parents, paid teachers, middle school volunteers, or homeschoolers.  Another thing that I appreciated about participating in this activity was Candy modeling the importance of teacher as storyteller.  As we zipped around the city in our colorful trolley, Candy was telling us even more colorful stories about the places we were seeing and the people who created, inhabited, and then left them.  It was great evidence for me in my belief that history is not about facts and figures and dates and such, but rather a narrative about events that have happened in our past and why they matter.  But, then, that might have been a factor of a theory I heard in another educational podcast I listened to today:  You don't believe what you see, you see what you believe.

Anyway, it was a fun evening.  I was actually familiar with most of the major historical sites we passed, and had already had an educational field trip there with my son and his peers (one of the great advantages of homeschooling is being able to go study where things took place, rather than doing it in a classroom).  But I really see the value of having visited the parts, then pulling them together as a whole, as we did in this trip.  For example, we have visited Oakwood Cemetery, which is on land donated from the Mordecai plantation, and we have visited the Mordecai House, which was located on the other end of the plantation.  But we have never traveled from the Mordecai House to Oakwood Cemetery and thus gotten a physical representation of how large the estate was.  We have gone to the Joel Lane House and heard all about how Raleigh was established when Joel Lane sold 1,000 acres to the state legislature.  But we have never gone from the Joel Lane House to North Street, West Street, South Street, and East Street, and covered the traditional boundaries of the original capitol city made from those 1,000 acres.

So once again I learned some valuable lessons about teaching middle schoolers from Dr. Beal.  And because she was generous enough to share her insight with me, I wanted to share it with you.