PORT TOWNSEND — Writing tall tales perks student interest in all subjects, Blue Heron Middle School educators said after Writers in the Schools finished a two-week program there.
“It’s an incredible program,” fourth-grade teacher Lisa Olsen said Friday.
“I’ve seen kids who have no interest in writing making amazing progress, seeing themselves as writers.”
Olsen said she has observed students who are so inspired by the class that it affects their attitudes toward school and increases their participation and interest in all subjects.
This is the eighth year the program has visited Blue Heron, bringing professional writers into the school to teach poetry and fiction to all grade levels.
The five writers this year were Karen Finnyfrock, Rachel Kessler, Samar Abulhassen, Laura Gamache and Peter Mumford.
During their Port Townsend visit, the writers were housed at Fort Worden as guests of Centrum arts center.
Finnyfrock, who taught the fourth-graders, used tall tales as a theme.
She encouraged the students to create fanciful, unbelievable stories along the lines of Paul Bunyan and Brer Rabbit.
“This was the first time that I taught tall tales here and it dovetailed nicely with what the students were learning about the migration to the West Coast,” Finnyfrock said.
“It was a perfect opportunity to talk about tall tales and how they grew up as the United States grew up.”
The stories were based on the students’ location and imagination.
They received extra points for exaggeration.
One character denigrated Port Townsend’s “City of Dreams” characterisation because “not everyone likes dreams, I like nightmares.”
Some gave their characters superpowers.
One character “could jump so far he didn’t need an airplane to get to France” while another “had shoes made of bacon that were so huge if they were to step on the Space Needle it would snap like a toothpick.”
Finnyfrock said she and the teachers read the stories while they were in development, offering advice but not criticism.
“I think the best thing I can do is to teach creativity and engage them in the process of creative risk-taking,” she said.
Finnyfrock said the finished stories reflected the local environment.
“The students have such an awareness of the natural world living in Port Townsend,” she said.
“They exaggerate about the trees and the salt water and the whales and the mountains because they see that around them every day.
“I was really charmed by the settings they included in their stories for that reason.”
The students read their tall tales aloud from books created from construction paper, including handwritten text and hand-drawn art.
They will take them home, Olsen said, but not before they are all typed to create an anthology so “they can all read each other’s stories,” she said.
After students read their stories, their classmates made comments, usually praise for a particular description or scene.
“This program fosters a passion for the written word,” said Matthew Holshouser, the school’s principal.
“It inspires them to enjoy writing because writing goes across all content matters.
“They will go to a science class and write a lab report or need to write something in a social studies or math class.”
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Jefferson County Editor Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or cbermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
