Young poets flex their writing chops at Cesar E. Chavez Elementary School in Oxnard
One by one, the young poets took the stage at Cesar E. Chavez Elementary School in Oxnard Thursday to read their work to the crowd of families.
The roughly four dozen students, graduates of the school's spring break Young Writer's Academy, read of their favorite soccer players, the past times they loved and the neighborhoods that shaped them.
"We want to capture their young minds as writers," Principal Bertha Anguiano said. "It's creativity more than anything."
The program was run over two weeks in late March and early April by the South Coast Writing Project, the UC Santa Barbara-based outpost of the nearly 50-year-old National Writing Project.
On Thursday, the students picked their favorite work to read for their families, then each got to take home a copy of a special anthology of their work.
Nicole Wald, co-director of the South Coast project, said that the program focuses less on writing techniques and grammar than engaging students in the creative process. Once students are locked in, she said, teaching language skills — both for native and non-native English speakers — gets easier.
This academy focused on fourth through seventh graders, but Wald said the South Coast Writing Project has run camps as young as third grade and as old as high school.
Wald said the project's core focus is not the particular batch of students going through each academy but the teachers who take a break from their full-time jobs to run the programs and learn the writing education techniques the project espouses.
When the four local teachers who ran this academy headed back to their classrooms they did so with a new arsenal of teaching techniques and new ways to engage their students, she said.
Isaiah Murtaugh covers education for the Ventura County Star in partnership with Report for America. Reach him at isaiah.murtaugh@vcstar.com or 805-437-0236 and follow him on Twitter @isaiahmurtaugh and @vcsschools. You can support this work with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Young poets flex writing chops at Oxnard elementary school
