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by Luke Perry

Luke Perry is a middle school language arts educator at Springfield Middle School in Springfield, Michigan. "Who wants to spend the next thirty days writing a script?" This is the question that led my sixth grade class on a writing adventure that took us from war-torn beaches to invading aliens, and from invading gnomes to talking kittens trying to break their fellow felines out of the pound. It was a journey of creativity and wonder, and a ton of teachable moments!

Script Frenzy came to our classroom via NaNoWriMo. We had participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) the November prior to our scriptwriting extravaganza. The experience was so amazing that we began almost immediately to look for some other writing activity that would create the same kind of enthusiasm and excitement. As soon as the Script Frenzy e-mails started coming, we signed up!

Now, we had no clue as to how the month-long project would turn out. NaNoWriMo had trained us to be focused on the creative, so we charged in with that in mind. I learned fast that Script Frenzy lent itself to an incredible amount of teachable moments. Prior to the beginning of April, the students and I immersed ourselves in a study of how scripts are structured, how staging is dictated, how directions are given, and how mood is set. We looked at scripts for plays, TV shows, radio serials, and movies. We learned how to label the parts of a script simply through how they were placed upon the page. All the while, we began to develop our ideas and create our vision.

 

Through the Script Frenzy website, we found Scripped.com which gave us an incredible (and free!) online tool to use to create our scripts and put them into the correct format. We discovered that students could write their scripts together for a true collaborative writing experience, which greatly changed the dynamic of the writing experience for everyone involved. It’s hard to coordinate ideas between two writers, and my students learned a great deal about working together and making compromises.

 

Script Frenzy offered an invitation to teach grammar, dialect, structure, characterization, tone, mood, foil, protagonist, antagonist, dialogue, staging, setting, and genre after genre after genre! The best part of all these mini-lessons was that they arose from the questions and requests of my students. They asked me to teach them how! It’s not often the kids dictate to the teacher what they want to be taught!

 

So, what did the students learn? In our follow-up reflection on their writing experience, some students discovered that scriptwriting was their passion, and a few others discovered that scriptwriting wasn’t for them at all. What I learned is that my students were developing an understanding of themselves as writers. By participating in these kinds of projects, my students were learning to become authors – they began to see the world as a place where writing has purpose and relevance.

 

Am I participating this year? Absolutely! Along with about 45 other students, I’ll be taking that magical and exciting trip to the gnomes of Springfield Middle School , to the war-torn beaches of Transdentia, and to watch those kittens break their brother out of the pound!

 

See you there!

 

We would like to thank LearningExpress eFolio for sponsoring this blog. eFolio is an automated essay scoring program, which allows teachers to assign more writing practice without the added hours of editing and correcting.

 

Announcing Writing Teacher Webinar

Which Comes First, the Comma or the Pause?

Core Lessons for Motivating Students to Write Effectively

As a successful teacher, facilitator and author, Dona Young has a passion for making learning exciting and relevant. In addition to teaching writing at Indiana University Northwest, Young also facilitates writing programs at major corporations.

During this Webinar Dona will share her system for teaching effective punctuation decisions as well as provide a foundation for teaching grammar for writing. Teachers in all disciplines, in grade levels from elementary school through postsecondary, will gain an efficient, foolproof method for helping students improve the quality of their writing. Using this system, students quickly understand how to correct fragments and run-ons, for example, as they gain an entrée to more advanced writing principles.

Young holds a B.A. from Northern Illinois University and an M.A. from The University of Chicago. Young considers herself a lifelong learner, believing that who we become is a result of what we learn. Young is the author of the following books:

• Which Comes First, the Comma or the Pause? A Practical Guide to Writing, Writer’s Toolkit Publishing, 2009
• The Mechanics of Writing, Writer’s Toolkit Publishing, 2008
• Business English: Writing for the Global Workplace, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008
• Foundations of Business Communication, McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2006
• Writing From the Core: A Grammatical Writer, Writer’s Toolkit Publishing, available July 2009

 

Date:	Thursday, April 16, 3:00 Eastern Daylight Time/Noon Pacific Daylight Time
To register:	Click here