A Look Inside our Middle School Writing Lab
Emerald Connection September 17, 2024
By: Lachen Reid
As students and faculty settle into the rhythms of life at our K-8 campus, our middle schoolers have begun focusing on enhancing their writing skills through the weekly Writing Lab. Based on faculty evaluations of students’ writing, we’ve designed an engaging, hour-long workshop aimed at developing these skills. The Lab sessions combine 6th, 7th, and 8th graders into two evenly sized groups, encouraging cross-grade collaboration while maintaining our optimal teacher-student ratios, with three faculty members supporting each Lab. Writing Lab is ungraded and independent from the Humanities curriculum, allowing for a learning environment centered solely on skill development. Early results have been promising, with students actively participating, learning, and sharing laughs over the sentences they craft.
We believe that as students’ ability to express themselves clearly in writing improves, so do their abilities to think critically, evaluate their own ideas, and better understand the world around them. In Writing Lab, we focus both on building technical writing skills and on the broader importance of eloquent writing as a crucial prerequisite for meaningful participation in today’s world. The Labs address a variety of learning styles, and as we observe which methods most effectively cultivate engagement and skill improvement, we’ll adjust the curriculum accordingly.
We began the year with a focus on specific technical skills, particularly punctuation and vocabulary development. To master common punctuation marks, students are tasked with identifying, labeling, and describing the effect of different punctuation on sample sentences. They then apply this knowledge by writing their own sentences using each punctuation mark, sharing their work with classmates for evaluation and discussion.
To expand students’ vocabularies, we initiated a discussion on the differences between colloquial and academic language, as well as the role of slang and how language evolves in response to social environments. Students then revised recent writing assignments, incorporating higher-level vocabulary to make their ideas more specific and coherent.
Our hope is that these Writing Lab sessions offer students a space to step outside their writing comfort zones and acquire new skills that they can apply in their Humanities classes, upper school, and beyond. We are excited to continue refining and developing the Writing Lab curriculum to achieve these goals throughout the year, and we are delighted to be working with such bright and dedicated students.
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