Engage Youth in Writing Activities

 In my September newsletter I featured a blog written by Sheri Edwards, a retired educator from Washington State. I met her in 2013 through the online #CLMOOC community and we've stayed connected since then. 

Below is a post Sheri made on Mastodon about the October National #WriteOut event. She points to this page on her blog. 

I follow Sheri and many other educators on several social media platforms. Many are involved in the annual #WriteOut event and share their work on social media and their own blogs.  You can learn about it on this page. 

I share this because every volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning program, along with every school, could be using the #WriteOut event to stimulate student curiosity, reading and writing during October as volunteers are just beginning to build relationships with students, or at any other time of  the year.

In the programs I led, between 1975 and 2011, we included writing activities in October and throughout the year. We published what students wrote in our newsletters and in special publications, because one of the greatest motivations for writers is seeing their own words in print!

Below is the December 1978 newsletter, which at that time we called it "Monkee Words" after Montgomery Ward, which hosted the program. Many people referred to Wards as "Monkee Wards".

Scroll through the pages and you'll find many poems written by 2nd to 6th grade students. 

Below is a copy of the November 1983 newsletter. The name had been changed to Tutoring Tattler, which was used through 1992 (and might still be used by Tutoring Chicago). This shows winners of the Halloween writing contest and includes some student work.  

In the December 1986 Tutoring Tattler you can find information about that year's Christmas Writing activity.

By 1991 we were creating separate publications to share student writing.  Below is the October 1991 KidsWork. 

I left the original tutoring program in October 1992 and with a few volunteers formed Cabrini Connections, to help kids who aged out of the first program after 6th grade have continued support through high school. This is when we also created the Tutor/Mentor Connection, to share work we and others were doing to help programs like ours grow in more places.

We continued to encourage student writing and creative expression.  Below is the "WUZ UP! teen news from 1996.

Visit the Cabrini Blog and look on the right side. You'll see a link to the Writing Club, along with links to other creative learning activities, that expanded the tutor/mentor experience beyond the one-to-one tutor/mentor relationship.  This blog was active from 2006 to 2011 but was not continued after I left the organization in 2011.  While it is an archive now it offers many lessons others could borrow for their own programs.

In the Homework Help section of the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC website you'll find many more activities that you might use to engage students and volunteers on fund, creative and on-going learning and relationship-building.

I've been honored to be part of the Tutoring Chicago 60th Anniversary campaign, which has shared clips from an interview with me in several of their posts on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. I wrote about it in this post. 

I hope that this leads more people to my blog and websites so that more begin using the ideas and archives I share to build and sustain mentor-rich non-school programs that reach K-12 kids who live in high poverty, under-resourced, neighborhoods of Chicago and other places.

I hope it also encourages a few to reach out and help fund my work, or to help create a Tutor/Mentor Connection strategy on one, or many, college campuses.  You can find me on many social media platforms. See links on this page.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy a safe and fun Halloween weekend!