WILKES UNIVERSITY CONDUCTS WRITINGWORKSHOPS
Fifth Grade: (front row l tor) Adina Newcome-Biell, Bailey Fendler, Andrew Sarnevitz, Kyle Deutschman, Benjamin Kaplan (back row) Dr. Thomas A. Hamill, Megan Smith and Ashley Filipek
Sixth Grade: (front row l to r) Ashley Kaplan, Ross Kleinman, Asher Schwartz, Micah Kaplan (back row) Bianca Sabia, Erin Wimer, Melissa Bugdal and Dr. Thomas A. Hamill
“I love having Wilkes come. The feedback is great, and I love meeting the students.” “They made us better writers.” “They have opened my mind and inspired me.” “These students were honest about their opinions in order to help us.” “Before I met Dr. Hamill and his students, I didn’t think about writing. Now I am in the process of writing a book.” “[They] … made me realize that even though I am the writer, I must use the reader’s perspective.”
These are just some of the reflections the fifth through seventh grade students had after participating in a series of writing workshops conducted by Dr. Thomas A. Hamill, Wilkes University, Assistant Professor of English, and members of Wilkes’s Alpha Gamma Alpha Chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, The International English Honor Society.
These workshops were made possible through a grant awarded by Creative Communication, Inc., an organization which reviews and publishes students’ written efforts. Because the United Hebrew Institute was awarded Creative Communication’s Poetic Achievement Award for the Fall 2007, Mrs. Barbara Welch, language arts teacher, and the school were invited to apply for and subsequently were awarded one of the two grants designated for schools in Pennsylvania. Upon receiving notification of the receipt of the grant, UHI secured Dr. Hamill to coordinate this writing program.
Dr. Hamill along with Sigma Tau Delta members, Melissa Bugdal, Ashley Filipek, Bianca Sabia, Megan Smith, and Erin Wimer, conducted two workshops for the fifth grade students as well as two visits for the sixth and seventh grade students. During the first set of workshops, the students worked through a series of writing exercises where they wrote to two different “emotions” to develop possible plot lines for their short stories. After the students had written their stories, Dr. Hamill and the students from Wilkes University returned to UHI to guide them through the revision stage of the writing process. At the end of the workshops, students volunteered to read their written efforts. By partnering with the writing workshop mentors from Wilkes, the UHI students gained an appreciation for the important work one must do to revise and polish one’s written efforts.