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Classrooms can get awfully boxy sometimes. Time for a field trip to the Telling Room! Students come to our Writing Center for the morning or the afternoon with their classmates and teachers to engage in the writer’s world. Ideally, each session lasts for two and a half hours, but we are always willing to be flexible with time. At the end of the trip, each writer departs not only with his or her own creation but also with a keener sense of how to develop a story, write descriptively, and revise thoughtfully. These are the kind of skills that bolster a student’s performance in school and across all disciplines.
We are constantly astounded by children’s abilities to create stories while finding their own distinctive voices. These programs are designed to foster young writers—those who already love writing and those who come to it more reluctantly—so that all participants can benefit equally. All Field Trip curricula is geared toward learners of all ages and abilities, including those from ELL and special needs classrooms, or those who are speech, sight, or hearing-impaired. And did we mention we have fun?
Build-a-Book
The Telling Room’s Build-a-Book field trips are literary excursions in which young writers spend a half-day at the Telling Room’s writing center imagining, writing, and publishing their very own storybooks. In a rousing couple of hours, the staff and a group of professional writers and artists lead the class in a book-building workshop. They start off in a collaborative effort interrupted by some trademark Telling Room hijinx and tomfoolery, and then each individual has a chance to write and illustrate the book that comes together as if by magic.
The books contain a story set in a local Maine town, developed by the entire class during a spirited group brainstorm. The Telling Room’s lead teacher and assisting volunteers use group writing exercises designed to help students map the places they live and mine their own personal geographies for great story characters and plots. Children finish their time with us by writing their own endings to their own unique version of the book, and by creating author biographies and drawing illustrations for the book jackets. We believe that it’s especially important for kids to leave with an actual book they authored, so we print and bind the books on site.
Photography & Writing
In our Photography & Writing field trip, digital cameras make us focus on the most intriguing details of our Old Port surroundings. Using the photographer’s tools of observation and capture, we help students learn to frame stories and note that it is the crispness and quality of even the tiniest details that bring color to our stories’ settings and characters.
In the course of our morning together, we first view a series of artistic images at our studio space, and discover that photographers shoot with intention, composing their subjects deliberately. After this look at art photography, we head out with our lenses into the neighborhood, to its wharves, cobblestones, and byways, to see what images catch our attention. Back at The Telling Room, we set to work unraveling the stories that we captured, marrying image to words in poetic or narrative form. Students leave this field trip with a piece of writing in progress and lasting images of their walk along the working waterfront. This field trip is best for writers ages 12-18.
Writing Through the Senses
Our Senses field trip prompts students to write their world according to the sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes they encounter every day. In this workshop, we encourage students to write on impulse, because too much thinking can run our writing aground or stop us even before we even start.
Using sensory prompts—smelling and looking at the suddenly strange textures of spices, feeling mysterious objects in black bags, and observing color and detail-rich photographs—we warm up our pens and allow our natural storytelling instincts to take over. Students then choose a fragment of their writing to expand on, ‘finding the heat’ in descriptive language, and receive the studio space they need to focus or confer one-on-one with a member of our staff as they develop ideas into story and verse. This field trip model culminates with a work in progress and a whole group reading. This one is great for beginning writers!
The Portland Word Walk
On this imaginative field trip, students pound the pavement, bricks, wharves, and cobblestones around the Old Port, their pockets crammed with curious, mischievous, and sometimes brilliant words and phrases on brightly colored slips of paper. As they tour Portland’s downtown on foot, they leave the papers behind them, figuring out which words belong in which new homes—a trashcan bears the phrase, “take it or leave it,” and a park bench brandishes “get up and dance!” like a new tattoo.
After their word walk, students of this field trip return to The Telling Room to write about their experience—maybe imagining someone’s reaction to seeing the city in a new way, because of their word art, and developing a story or poem from this scene they’ve helped to create. Telling Room writers and artists circulate the writing studio to help students find and develop their voices, and at the end of the day encourage everyone to read a favorite line or a whole piece of writing.
Want to participate in a Telling Room Field Trip? Choose one of these models and get in touch. Field Trips are one of our most popular programs and they do book up quickly. Interested teachers and parents should call (774-6064) or email Molly McGrath, our program director, for more information.
