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Y4 | THEA 3XX CMPL 3XX | CRWR 3XX CRWR 490 |
Africana Studies; Cinema Studies; Comparative Literature; Languages; English; Theater.
Creative Writing Major Requirements Creative Writing Department
100 Last-Day-of-School Activities Your Students Will Love!
Help your students take their writing to the next level.
When students write for teachers, it can feel like an assignment. When they write for a real purpose, they are empowered! Student writing contests are a challenging and inspiring way to try writing for an authentic audience— a real panel of judges —and the possibility of prize money or other incentives. We’ve gathered a list of the best student writing contests, and there’s something for everyone. Prepare highly motivated kids in need of an authentic writing mentor, and watch the words flow.
With a wide range of categories—from critical essays to science fiction and fantasy—The Scholastic Awards are a mainstay of student contests. Each category has its own rules and word counts, so be sure to check out the options before you decide which one is best for your students.
Students in grades 7-12, ages 13 and up, may begin submitting work in September by uploading to an online account at Scholastic and connecting to their local region. There are entry fees, but those can be waived for students in need.
This ends soon, but if you have students who are ready to submit, it’s worth it. YoungArts offers a national competition in the categories of creative nonfiction, novel, play or script, poetry, short story, and spoken word. Student winners may receive awards of up to $10,000 as well as the chance to participate in artistic development with leaders in their fields.
YoungArts accepts submissions in each category through October 13. Students submit their work online and pay a $35 fee (there is a fee waiver option).
Each year, awards are given for Student Book Scholars, Amazing Women, and the “I Matter” Poetry & Art competition. This is a great chance for kids to express themselves with joy and strength.
The rules, prizes, and deadlines vary, so check out the website for more info.
If you’re looking to help students take a deep dive into international relations, history, and writing, look no further than this essay contest. Winners receive a voyage with the Semester at Sea program and a trip to Washington, DC.
Students fill out a registration form online, and a teacher or sponsor is required. The deadline to enter is the first week of April.
This annual contest invites students to write about a political official’s act of political courage that occurred after Kennedy’s birth in 1917. The winner receives $10,000, and 16 runners-up also receive a variety of cash prizes.
Students may submit a 700- to 1,000-word essay through January 12. The essay must feature more than five sources and a full bibliography.
Bennington College offers competitions in three categories: poetry (a group of three poems), fiction (a short story or one-act play), and nonfiction (a personal or academic essay). First-place winners receive $500. Grab a poster for your classroom here .
The contest runs from September 1 to November 1. The website links to a student registration form.
Looking for student writing contests for budding playwrights? This exclusive competition, which is open only to high school juniors, is judged by the theater faculty of Princeton University. Students submit short plays in an effort to win recognition and cash prizes of up to $500. ( Note: Only open to 11th graders. )
Students submit one 10-page play script online or by mail. The deadline is the end of March. Contest details will be published in early 2024.
The Leonard L. Milberg ’53 High School Poetry Prize recognizes outstanding work by student writers in 11th grade. Prizes range from $100 to $500.
Students in 11th grade can submit their poetry. Contest details will be published this fall.
This contest is also a wonderful writing challenge, and the New York Times includes lots of resources and models for students to be able to do their best work. They’ve even made a classroom poster !
Submissions need to be made electronically by November 1.
The deadline for this contest is the end of October. Sponsored by Hollins University, the Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest awards prizes for the best poems submitted by young women who are sophomores or juniors in high school or preparatory school. Prizes include cash and scholarships. Winners are chosen by students and faculty members in the creative writing program at Hollins.
Students may submit either one or two poems using the online form.
The Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers is open to high school sophomores and juniors, and the winner receives a full scholarship to a Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop .
Submissions for the prize are accepted electronically from November 1 through November 30.
High school students can win up to $1,000 and publication by entering an essay on a topic specified by the Jane Austen Society related to a Jane Austen novel.
Details for the 2024 contest will be announced in November. Essay length is from six to eight pages, not including works cited.
Open to students from 15 to 18 years old who are interested in publication and exposure over monetary awards.
Teachers may choose five students for whom to submit up to four poems each on their behalf. The deadline is November 15.
This is a chance for new and emerging writers to gain publication in their own professionally published chapbook, as well as $500 and free copies of the book.
There is an $18 entry fee, and submissions are made online.
For students under 18, the YouthPlays one-act competition is designed for young writers to create new works for the stage. Winners receive cash awards and publication.
Scroll all the way down their web page for information on the contest, which accepts non-musical plays between 10 and 40 minutes long, submitted electronically. Entries open each year in January.
The 2024 Ocean Awareness Contest, Tell Your Climate Story , encourages students to write their own unique climate story. They are asking for creative expressions of students’ personal experiences, insights, or perceptions about climate change. Students are eligible for a wide range of monetary prizes up to $1,000.
Students from 11 to 18 years old may submit work in the categories of art, creative writing, poetry and spoken word, film, interactive media and multimedia, or music and dance, accompanied by a reflection. The deadline is June 13.
Each year, EngineerGirl sponsors an essay contest with topics centered on the impact of engineering on the world, and students can win up to $500 in prize money. This contest is a nice bridge between ELA and STEM and great for teachers interested in incorporating an interdisciplinary project into their curriculum. The new contest asks for pieces describing the life cycle of an everyday object. Check out these tips for integrating the content into your classroom .
Students submit their work electronically by February 1. Check out the full list of rules and requirements here .
The National Council of Teachers of English offers several student writing awards, including Achievement Awards in Writing (for 10th- and 11th-grade students), Promising Young Writers (for 8th-grade students), and an award to recognize Excellence in Art and Literary Magazines.
Deadlines range from October 28 to February 15. Check out NCTE.org for more details.
Children of incarcerated parents can submit artwork, poetry, photos, videos, and more. Submissions are free and the website has a great collection of past winners.
Students can submit their entries via social media or email by October 25.
The Adroit Journal, an education-minded nonprofit publication, awards annual prizes for poetry and prose to exceptional high school and college students. Adroit charges an entry fee but also provides a form for financial assistance.
Sign up at the website for updates for the next round of submissions.
The National PTA offers a variety of awards, including one for literature, in their annual Reflections Contest. Students of all ages can submit entries on the specified topic to their local PTA Reflections program. From there, winners move to the local area, state, and national levels. National-level awards include an $800 prize and a trip to the National PTA Convention.
This program requires submitting to PTAs who participate in the program. Check your school’s PTA for their deadlines.
The World Historian Student Essay Competition is an international contest open to students enrolled in grades K–12 in public, private, and parochial schools, as well as those in home-study programs. The $500 prize is based on an essay that addresses one of this year’s two prompts.
Students can submit entries via email or regular mail before May 1.
The National Society of High School Scholars awards three $2,000 scholarships for both poetry and fiction. They accept poetry, short stories, and graphic novel writing.
Apply online by October 31.
Whether you let your students blog, start a podcast or video channel, or enter student writing contests, giving them an authentic audience for their work is always a powerful classroom choice.
Plus, check out our favorite anchor charts for teaching writing..
Competitions in STEM, ELA and the arts, and more! Continue Reading
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‘Want pupils to score more highly in GCSE English? Focus on creative writing’
The new English language GCSE has plenty of critics. Research has even suggested that the new course could be putting pupils off reading .
But I disagree. I think that the new GCSE gives real scope for creativity and for us to make the qualification more accessible to those learners who have had a negative experience of studying English.
Last year I secured funding through Shine’s Let Teachers Shine competition to support a project I’ve been working on called Write On!, which is an approach to the GCSE resits that maximises progress by focussing mainly on written literacy and creative-writing skills.
And while I am working specifically with resit students, I think that the same approaches could benefit other students who struggle with English.
So, why does teaching creative writing help students to do better in GCSE English? In a nutshell, because it means focusing your teaching where the marks are.
Critics of the new English language GCSE often cite the 19th-century content as a barrier for less-able students or those with very weak literacy. I don’t agree with that premise for a number of pedagogical reasons, but we don’t even need to get into those, because the 19th-century component counts for such a small percentage of the available marks .
For example, on the Edexcel specification, the 19th-century literature accounts for just 15 per cent of the GCSE - and that 15 per cent isn’t awarded for knowledge of nineteenth-century literature, but for application of skills that could be practised in the classroom just as effectively on any modern text.
The creative tasks, on the other hand, account for 50 per cent of the marks. This means that half of the marks in the GCSE are awarded for two tasks that are, simply put, to write a story and to write a letter or speech. Looking at the raw numbers, if a student scores 5 out of 40 in the story task and 5 out of 40 in the other writing task, they will achieve a grade 1 in their GCSE.
But what does an approach based around these creative elements look like in practice?
I focus lessons on the basic skills of literacy and creative writing: developing imagination, building confidence - and gently supporting the improvement of sentencing, paragraphing and punctuation. Skills essential for all students, regardless of how functional or poetic their real-life literacy needs will be.
Then, to make the non-fiction writing element more engaging, I prefer to model it through creative fiction examples. I show students two- or three-minute rousing speeches from films such as Independence Day , Braveheart , and Legally Blonde . These are crammed full of interesting creative features and are a length that’s a much more realistic model for students to scavenge and scaffold from than Demosthenes’ Third Philippic , or whatever the hell educational publishers are putting in their joyless anthologies these days.
Similarly, you would be hard-pressed to find a more engaging example of creative letter writing than the stylish young adult novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower .
Even the reading section clearly serves writing skills. The basic format is: here are some example texts, take a look at how they use language and structure, evaluate how successful they are, now have a go at something similar yourself. In truth, it is more coherent and rigorous than the outgoing creative writing A level, which didn’t survive reform.
For me, this is why there is no need for an alternative qualification and no argument that the GCSE is anything but a gift to those of us teaching students who are belatedly beginning to enjoy English and to make progress in it.
Andrew Otty leads 16-19 English in a South West college. He tweets @Education720
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Reaping the benefits. To see how creative writing impacts students, I invite them to rate their resilience through a self-compassion survey at the start of the school year and again in the spring. Last year, two-thirds of students surveyed increased in self-compassion; Alejandro grew his self-compassion by 20 percent.
Serving more than 350 teenage girls (ages 13 to 18) in metropolitan Los Angeles, WriteGirl describes its program as taking an intensive approach to creative writing education that focuses on "creativity, critical thinking, and leadership skills to empower teen girls." Many of the girls attend overcrowded and underfunded urban public schools.
By Pressto May 24, 2023. Creativity plays a crucial role in the writing process. It is the driving force behind originality, imagination, and the ability to produce engaging and impactful written work. Students and creativity in writing go hand in hand. Writing is not only a fundamental skill but also a means of self-expression and exploration ...
Creative writing is an exercise in solving problems, either for the characters within the story or for the author themselves. Characters within stories need to be navigated through a series of difficulties, and if the problems take place in the real world, then the solutions must also be real-world solutions. If the problem is a literal dragon ...
Creativity is fundamental to the teaching of writing. Although WR 153 focuses specifically on creativity and innovation, all WR courses ask students to approach their reading, viewing, writing, and research in creative ways. One important approach to creativity is "design thinking," which emphasizes that creativity is a non-linear ...
The Benefits of Creative Writing. 1. Why Learn Creative Writing: Improved Self-Expression. Improving your writing skills leads to stronger communication. When you practice finding the right word in a story or poem, you engage the same parts of your brain that are active in everyday writing and speaking.
Writing is one of the most cognitively complex tasks that we can ask our students to perform. It can and should be done in every subject area. Writing boosts critical thinking and requires the mental organization of new learning. In turn, it increases retention while deepening the understanding of that new learning.
We've outlined a seven-step method that will scaffold your students through each phase of the creative process from idea generation through to final edits. 7. Create inspiring and original prompts. Use the following formats to generate prompts that get students inspired: personal memories ("Write about a person who taught you an important ...
2. Poetry. A rhythmic and metaphorical form of writing, poetry allows writers to express feelings, thoughts, and stories in a condensed and poignant manner. 3. Drama. Written to be performed, drama includes scripts for movies, plays, and television shows. 4. Creative Non-Fiction.
Examining Elements of Creative Writing in First Grade. For this particular unit, my first grade students were examining literature and storytelling. After they had enjoyed several read-alouds, explored story elements, and studied the story mountain (beginning, rising action, conflict, resolution, and ending) as a team, it was time for them to ...
Creative writing teaches students to think critically about stories and craft compelling narratives that draw readers in. This skill is precious for those who wish to pursue careers outside traditional writing roles—such as marketing or advertising—where storytelling is key. ... Creative writing has many benefits, both for the writer and ...
Not every student will publish work or win prizes and very few will be able to earn a living putting pen to paper, but the teaching of creative writing is about more than that. Why the teaching of ...
Creative writing plays an important role in a child's literacy development. This article makes suggestions for the instruction and evaluation of children's stories. Most children enter school with a natural interest in writing, an inherent need to express themselves in words (Graves, 1983). Couple this with a child's love of stories and ...
For some students, getting started is often the hardest part, especially if they think of writing as purely "fixed and formal," writes assistant headteacher Clare Jarmy recently for TES Magazine.She, like McCarthy, recommends demystifying the process with lots of "specific activities for students to do before and after writing," which help them to "trial ideas, structures and ...
Writing reflectively requires a person to ask themselves questions and continuously be open, curious and analytical. It can increase self-awareness by helping people learn from their experiences ...
The Many Benefits of Creative Writing. The importance of establishing a safe space where students can express themselves cannot be overstated. But there is a multitude of other benefits to creative writing. It can help students with the following: 1. Clarifying Thoughts. As much as creative writing allows for emotional release, it also is a ...
Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #8: Encourage Peer Collaboration and Feedback. We can tell students something a hundred times, but they won't listen until a peer says the same thing. Us educators know the value of positive peer interaction, so don't limit it in a creative writing class!
However, research shows that writing skills help students become better readers and ultimately understand all subjects better. On a national policy level, the critical importance of writing was underscored with the adoption of Common Core standards in 2010, which emphasize how writing must be taught and addressed across every subject area.
The Online Writing Lab (the Purdue OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out ...
The survey revealed that the most popular creative writi ng activity was writing detective, horror, and what-if. stories (45% of the students agreed with that) whereas poetry writing scored 27% ...
We owe it to ourselves — and our coworkers — to make space for processing this individual and collective trauma. A recent op-ed in the New York Times Sunday Review affirms what I, as a writer ...
Creative writing is said to be helpful in decision-making and stress relieving, improving mental health. In summary, creative writing can help with the following psychological factors: - Gaining mental clarity. - Increasing self-esteem. - Improving attention span. - Expressing feelings. - Enhancing and boosting creativity. - Strengthening memory.
A recent study sheds light on why writing is such a beneficial activity—not just in subjects typically associated with writing, like history and English, but across all subjects. Professor Steve Graham and his colleagues at Arizona State University's Teachers College analyzed 56 studies looking at the benefits of writing in science, social studies, and math and found that writing ...
To sum up responses to the question, then, reflective writing benefits students because it. Helps students identify their tacit knowledge as well as gaps in that knowledge. Brings to the surface rhetorical and writing process decisions that can focus subsequent revision or learning. Encourages growth as a working professional.
The Creative Writing Department prioritizes an inclusive workshop climate where creative expression, experimentation, and collaboration thrive. Our program offers an in-depth and rigorous course of study with instruction, studio training, and coursework in a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, and hybrid forms.
Students in 11th grade can submit their poetry. Contest details will be published this fall. 9. The New York Times Tiny Memoir Contest. This contest is also a wonderful writing challenge, and the New York Times includes lots of resources and models for students to be able to do their best work.
(1867). A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrim-ination, for example, must be tied to . that student's. courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose herit-age or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to . that student's . unique ability to contribute to the ...
The creative tasks, on the other hand, account for 50 per cent of the marks. This means that half of the marks in the GCSE are awarded for two tasks that are, simply put, to write a story and to write a letter or speech. Looking at the raw numbers, if a student scores 5 out of 40 in the story task and 5 out of 40 in the other writing task, they ...
Students and Teachers. Introductory Pricing Terms and Conditions Creative Cloud Introductory Pricing Eligible students 13 and older and teachers can purchase an annual membership to Adobe® Creative Cloud™ for a reduced price of for the first year. At the end of your offer term, your subscription will be automatically billed at the standard subscription rate, currently at (plus applicable ...