Writing for Contests: Grades 7-8

About this course

Writing for Contests is a creative and transactional writing course where the in-class activities and projects are written to participate in writing contests from all over the world. Students will write short stories, poetry, essays and articles with the chance of winning prizes and being published in renowned publications!

What you'll learn

By the end of this course, students will review and practice literary techniques to prepare them for several unique writing contests. Students will learn about literary fiction (story structure, character- and world-building, vocabulary and voice), transactional nonfiction (writing to purpose, paragraphing and formatting), and poetry (imagery, figurative language, theme). Students will have participated in 4 writing contests:  

January: The New York Times Profile Contest

February: The New York Times STEM Writing Contest

March: The New York Times Editorial Contest

April: Poem In Your Pocket Day

May & June: TBD

Each lesson will begin with a five-minute warmup to situate the students with the main ideas of the lesson. Throughout the following hour and a half, the students will be given a variety of resources, examples, lectures and activities to help them accomplish their main project for the month. As this is a writing course, a significant amount of time, usually toward the end of the lesson, is used for independent writing tasks with a review and a discussion of their progress to close.   

Materials & Homework

• All students should be fully literate in the English language at the appropriate curriculum level for their current academic year.
• All students must use a word processor such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs and be able to submit their homework in .doc or .docx format to Teams.