National Day on Writing – Flat Rock Community High School
Andrea Gillies

To celebrate the National Day on Writing, we are going to host a writing marathon at Flat Rock Community High School. After speaking with our principal and media specialist, we have developed a potential format.

Our plan is to have 3-4 staff members "man" the marathon all day.

Students can either sign up for the entire day or just for a class period. Each hour we'll run two activities with prompts to get the kids going. We'll demo, model with them, and offer group reflection and critique. For those students who want to continue with a prompt (or anything else) we'll provide space in the media center and computer lab for them to do so. In no way do we want this to be tightly structured-- we just want to offer options for all kids.

Right now we're playing around with possible prompts and activities. It's also Teen Read Week, so we may do something like put a book jacket on a table and have kids "write the story" just from the jacket design.

As far as promoting it, I've thought of perhaps calling it "Round the Clock Writing." We may try to get shirts for the kids (and staff) who sign up and notify local media to cover it.

Our main goal is to get kids excited about writing! We're going to invite all staff-- teachers through administrators-- to participate. We hope to collect a body of work to not only place on NCTE's online gallery, but to also bind and distribute to everyone who participates.

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas, I'd love to hear them! (andrea_gillies@yahoo.com)