Published in the Jan. 21 – Feb. 3, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Darren McDonald’s sixth-grade class
We love to learn to write because writing opens up the world to us in many different ways to allow us to enjoy many different benefits. Writers of children’s books such as Rick Riordan, J.K. Rowling, and Jeff Kinney have written a lot of enjoyable stories, but they had to first learn the process of writing before they could do so.
We learned that writing is a process a lot like making a pizza. First we need our ingredients, which in writing is coming up with content such as facts, opinions and other information. To make pizza you also need tools. Writing tools include a computer word processor or a typewriter or a pencil and paper. But there are more to tools than just writing implements. Vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, capitalization and other tools help us get the content across to an audience.
Writing involves technique, just like making a pizza. Technique is about using writing tools to process the content — the ingredients — to make it easier for audiences to understand what you want say.
We learned about “The Six Serving Men” which was a poem written by Rudyard Kipling. The poem goes: “I keep six serving men, they taught me all I knew, their names are What, Why and When, Where, How and Who.” These names are questions and questions are important to know because they stimulate your brain to come up with answers which are the content you need for writing. These are not just questions you can ask other people, they are questions you can ask yourself as you start creating content so that you can find out what you think.
We love to learn to write. Please visit www.walsh.ca.campusgrid.net/home. to see what we’ve created in our process of learning to write.
After a writing workshop by Morgan Hill Life Publisher Marty Cheek, Darren McDonald’s sixth-grade class at P.A. Walsh STEAM Academy wrote this column.
