Write On! Albania

One of the most amazing and rewarding projects I've been involved in this Winter has been the Write On! Albania competition.  Write On! is a creative writing competition that was first started in 2003 in Georgia and now is an international competition including Peace Corps countries from all over Eastern Europe and Asia.  2011 was the first year Albania took part and it continues to grow every year.  For more information, check out the international website and the Albania specific website!

This was the first year Gramsh participated and I would call it a HUGE success!  We had 12 kids participate from Gramsh, 7 from the middle school and 5 from the high school.  To prepare for the competition, I've been working with my middle school English Club since the end of January.  In Albania, students dont get the chance to do much creative writing.  In school they focus on either poetry or essays, with little instruction on other types of writing.  So we started from the beginning.  We talked about how you write a paragraph, how you can use personification and point of view and how to use dialogue in stories.  I had them look at a picture and write a story about it and use inanimate objects as characters in a tale.  They were asked to imagine their perfect world and their perfect season and even to think about what would happen if they could talk to their pets.  And they did amazing!!  The same kids who looked at me like I was crazy the first week when I asked them to write a story about a snowman are now writing stories told from a dog's perspective.  Their creativity and writing skills grew with every week and even if none of them wins a prize, I could not be more proud of them.

So many beautiful words in these notebooks.  Couldn't be prouder!

Now that the competition is over, I'm hoping that we can keep the momentum going and continue to do creative writing exercises and maybe even start a Creative Writing Club!