SELI Young Writers Takes Shape

Attendance hasn't been all we'd like in the last few meetings, but the SELI Young Writers program is really taking shape.

Since most of the students have domestic work to do at home, they come at varying times. We have found that it works to have a journaling table. When they enter, the first stop is to take their writing folders, and the second stop is to do the journal assignment. Today it was to describe and to "perhaps" about the photograph you see on the table. Who is this woman? Where does she live, and what is she up to? Why are we so sure she is not a Sierra Leonean?

The girls in the foreground are in the third draft of their first (analytic) piece of writing. At this point, they move to word processing, where it is easier to revise and build good paragraphs. The girl on the left has just cut a sentence from one paragraph and pasted it into the next, where it makes more sense. Not bad, for a novice computer user and paragraph builder!

The student at the far table has moved on to the first draft of his second assignment, a personal writing challenge. We read all our first, and sometimes our second drafts, aloud to others for discussion and feedback. And we need more students to enrich that discussion!