Wordsmith creative writing curriculum helps kids develop writing skills that will last a lifetime. Teaching writing skills has never been easier than in this dynamic writing program. The Wordsmith Student Book is an easy-to-use creative writing course for young people that will develop their love for writing while building practical writing skills. The major principles addressed in this book apply to both types of writing:

Use definitive nouns and verbs, descriptive modifiers.
Understand and use sentence structure to advantage.
Anchor your writing in concrete detail; don't generalize.

Creative writing, in the simplest terms, is literally expressing oneself: a person communicating what is in him to the world outside. Why is this important? After all, most of the writing a child will have to do throughout his student career will be of the expository type: factual and objective. In an information age, the demand will increase for articulate writers who can communicate information clearly, without artistic frills or "creative" flourishes. So why bother with creative writing at all?

Expository writing is from the head; creative writing is from the heart.
The most memorable non-fiction is not dry, but charged with life and emotional appeal. The best fiction deals in concrete incident and detail, not vague flights of fancy.

Creative writing is a good place to start learning these principles, because your child has all the materials needed close at hand....language and experience.

(grades: 7&up)

Poets will build their poetry-writing skills with help from past and contemporary masters--everything from generating ideas to examining the finished poem.

They'll learn how to:
* Use journals to develop their observational skills and turn life experiences into ideas for poems
* Master the tools of the trade--voice, line, stanza, title, meter and rhyme
* Acquire fluency in a variety of poetry formats and forms, everything from narrative, lyric and dramatic verse (traditional formats) to fixed, free and sequence styles (traditional forms)
* Fine tune their work Exercises, assignments and sample work from more than 100 standout poets--everyone from Louise Glück to Walt Whitman--ensure that every reader, whether poet, student or bibliophile, discovers just how extraordinary poetry can be.

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond argues that both geography and the environment played major roles in determining the shape of the modern world. This argument runs counter to the usual theories that cite biology as the crucial factor. Diamond claims that the cultures that were first able to domesticate plants and animals were then able to develop writing skills, as well as make advances in the creation of government, technology, weaponry, and immunity to disease