Young Writers Explore Self Expression at the Young Writers' Workshop

This weekend, 359 Scarsdale third-, fourth- and fifth grade students participated in the PT Council's annual Young Writers' Workshop at the Scarsdale Middle School. The morning began with a presentation by keynote speaker and children's author Tommy Greenwald. Author of eleven books, Mr. Greenwald spoke about the challenges of getting children to read. He said the goal of his books is to make reading more appealing. The protagonist of his first, well-known series, Charlie Joe Jackson, named after his three sons, is a young boy who does not like to read – a character with whom many readers can relate. During the Q&A section, when asked why he writes, Mr. Greenwald responded: "Because it's awesome! I write stories to make kids laugh." He aspires to write books that are "funny, weird, and interesting." He also emphasized to the students that inspiration often comes from people and events that occur in real life and that much of his writing is realistic fiction and revolves around his own stories. As he said, "all writers should know that the things that happen around them could one day make it into a story." He also stressed the importance of resilience and editing – giving students a tangible example using the progression of a description about eating a French fries through three different drafts. He purposely misspelled the word "sundae" as "Sunday," imparting that computers can't fix every mistake. A writer needs to check his or her own work and shouldn't rely on computers. Lastly, he read a section from his new series Crime Biters, which turns his real life dog Abby into a crime fighter.

After the keynote speaker, each child attended two workshops of his/her choice from a list of more than thirty options. Among those options was a workshop on collage. Michael Albert, a famous pop artist, showed the students many of his works, demonstrating how he was able to visually represent different items of interest through magazine cutouts. Some of his featured works were a map of the USA, a map of different landmarks in New York City that took him 6 months to create, a list of the first 777 digits of Pi that took four years to piece together, the preamble, an animal collage, and a collage honoring the 13th Amendment. When asked how he decides what topics to explore, he said he usually picks a subject he's interested in, reads books or generally learns about it, and then makes artwork about that topic. After he showcased his works, the students had a turn creating their own collages.

In the workshop "Let's Add Emotion to Our Writing," workshop leader Scott Waxman spoke about the origins of emojis and how they can convey many different meanings. Using the saying "a picture is worth a thousands words," he asked the students to write down some ideas about what could be happening in response to different emojis and then had them create their own stories. When asked to share what they like about emojis, the students replied that emojis help express their feelings.

In another workshop, "How to Tell a Great Sports Story," Chris Raymond talked about the importance of setting a scene, developing a character, and using dialogue to convey ideas. He also instructed the young writers to use all of their senses so that people feel like they're actually there. He said that people are more interested when there are characters and dialogue woven into the story. A different sports story workshop, this one about creating your own fictional sports story, emphasized that as long as the story is fiction, you can start with something that happened and end with something that didn't so as to make the story more exciting.

Some other workshops included "Show Your Character," lead by Helen Bernstein, which asked students to create a character and then answer seven questions, such as what four words they would use to describe the character, so that students were able to more fully develop their descriptions. In "Passion for Fashion," students dressed up and then used descriptive language to describe the outfits of their peers. The last workshop visited, entitled "Imagine You're the Editor of Your Very Own Magazine," challenged students to write persuasive articles, such as one that argues for students having phones (his main point was safety). A final workshop discussed writing about food and challenged students to describe eating their favorite foods in descriptive and detailed ways.

The entire Young Writers' Workshop event ran smoothly thanks to the efforts of its co-chairs Isabel Finegold and Pam Fuehrer, the 75 parent volunteers, representatives of the SMS Student Organization and district custodial and audio/visual staff. Both parents and student volunteers commented that they had a lot of fun. As mother Jodi Cascade stated, "It's a nice thing to do as a parent because you get to be here with your children." Seventh grade S.O. representative Seth Jacobson talked about how he remembered the student representatives doing a good job when he was a student at the Young Writers' Workshop and now wanted to do the same. Scarsdale High School student Saadia Naeem decided to volunteer because the elementary students are so enthusiastic about the event. When asked, these students agreed that the event inspired them as writers and that they planned to attend the event again next year.