Writing – Mystery Story
Grade 8

Imagine sitting down to take a piano lesson for the first time. Your instructor tells you to play whatever comes to mind. “Just make it really expressive,” he says. In all likelihood the frustration and purposelessness of the experience will drive you away from the piano forever. Unfortunately, this is precisely how writing is taught in most language arts classrooms. Students are sat before a blank sheet of paper; they are given a topic; they are told to play. Eventually they turn away from writing in frustration. At LePort, we give our students a step-by-step course in writing. We begin with line-by-line summaries and rewrites of existing pieces of fiction and non-fiction. We progress to parsing apart longer stories in terms of essentials: characters, settings and conflicts. Students then preserve the bones of such stories, but are given free rein to creatively expand and alter ancillary details. By the end of eighth grade, our students are given only the most basic plot conflicts which they can then use or alter to build stories of their own creation. In other words, LePort doesn’t ask for symphonies before our students know how to play their instruments; yet, given enough time, our students become proficient composers. Read this original student story and see for yourself. Could you write this creatively? Could you construct such compelling characters? Could your adult co-workers?