Writing for a variety of contests locally, nationally, and even internationally serves to meet many goals in our composition instruction at Bios. It provides different perspectives on a student’s writing, provides a variety of topics and writing opportunities, and it is a method to help keep our writing instructors accountable.
The list of writing contests that Bios students enter are varied to say the least. In high school they have entailed cowboy poetry, science research, historical research, speaking, and literature reviews. The judges for each of these contests are just as rich in variety – former English teachers, engineers, judges, mayors, and police chiefs to name a few. All these people play an important role in our student’s education because teachers, being the humans they are, tend to like certain kinds of writing and not others. So our students have opportunities to be recognized by people other than their teachers.
When I taught our own children, I usually favored my older son’s writing over my younger son’s. I just liked his style better. But my younger son would win or place in many contests because those judges enjoyed his writing. Both sons placed in many writing contests, even with my bias.
Writing instructors tend to draw out writing assignments when they do not have deadlines to meet. A years worth of contests provides an aggressive but doable schedule for students to constantly practice their writing craft.
At the last school I was principal at, during our five year review from North Central Accreditation, the reviewer at her meeting to go over comments about our school mentioned how she wished more schools would provide the kind of writing instruction that we did with our contest entries.
On a final note, check out a wonderful web site, http://www.rachelstarrthomson.com/inklings/. Rachel Starr Thomson is a Christian, home-school graduate that writes books and articles for magazines. We entered a contest she had reviewing books. She liked four of our stories so far and wrote wonderful reviews on them. Not all the reviews are from our students. Also check out the wonderful writing of our students.
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Hi Tim,
I have always endorsed writing contests and congratulate you for doing the same. The two that we always entered at Cornerstone (I'm no longer administrator there) were the Grand Canyon State games and the ACSI creative writing contest. But I have also used others from time to time.
Here in Tucson another avenue has opened. A former Christian school teacher with a journalism background started a newspaper this year called The Student Press for Christian elementary students. Most of the articles come from homeschooled or Christian school students, although some are written by Christian students in public schools. It's really great for the kids to see their names in print in an organ with 15,000 circulation. They have a web site, if you want to check it out. Maybe you know someone in the Phoenix area who could do the same.
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