BoomWriter Media recently announced they will once again be providing the writing platform for The Writing Bee. This event is made available for free to classrooms, schools, and school districts around the world to participate. What's new for this year's event is the addition of a middle school Writing Bee that will take place concurrently with the Elementary Grade Writing Bee. Qualifying Rounds for both events will begin this February and continue through May with the Writing Bee Finals scheduled to take place in June.
This year's Writing Bee features Nick Bruel, author of the Bad Kitty series, for the Elementary Grades as well as civil rights icon and former Black Panther Jamal Joseph inspiring students with their creation of spoken word-orientated content in the Middle School Writing Bee. Following on the momentum generated by previous years' celebrity guest author Jeff Cohen from the Goonies and Jeff Kinney from The Diary of a Wimpy series, this year's authors promise to deliver the biggest and most interactive Writing Bee to date!
The Writing Bee represents a unique way for teachers to engage all of their students in reading and writing both within and beyond the school day. School districts, schools, or even individual classrooms can conduct their own local "Qualifying" Writing Bee using the prompts provided by the respective guest authors. Elementary grade students will use BoomWriter to complete subsequent chapters of a story created by Nick Bruel. This story will then be published and include the names of all participating students. Middle School Writing Bee participants will view video prompts provided by Jamal Joseph on BoomWriter offering instruction, inspiration and the themes around which the students will be creating their original spoken word-orientated content.
As with past years' Writing Bees, teachers have the option of providing personalized feedback to students once they've submitted their work in order for them to conduct revisions before the submissions go into the voting portion of the event. During voting, students review the anonymous submissions of their peers in small batches and cast votes for their favorite/s. Students who win their class, school, or district's qualifying rounds, as well as each event's top vote-getters, then qualify for The Writing Bee Finals. This knock-out style competition takes place in June with participants from around the world submitting their work and competing to become the Elementary and Middle School Writing Bee Champions and receive a $2,000 college savings scholarship!
There's a great buzz around this event (pardon the pun), but it really serves as a great way to get kids excited about writing. Keep in mind the last year's Writing Bee did reach capacity, so if you want your students to have the chance to participate you should go to the Writing Bee site as soon as possible and register your class, school, or district.
cross posted at cyber-kap.blogspot.com
David Kapuler is an educational consultant with more than 10 years of experience working in the K-12 environment. For more information about his work, contact him at dkapuler@gmail.com and read his blog at cyber-kap.blogspot.com.
