Each year, Badgerdog sends professional writers into classrooms across Central Texas, where they inspire students to embrace the challenge and beauty of writing. Our teaching artists follow Badgerdog’s READ-WRITE-SHARE teaching model. Lessons engage students through creative and critical thinking, and invite young writers to explore how language is used to create meaning and affect readers. All lessons are TEKS-aligned and tailored to support grade-level curriculum.

To best meet schools’ and teachers’ needs, Badgerdog teaching artists work with classroom teachers to understand students’ skill levels, areas of difficulty, and language arts objectives. Workshops can be aligned closely with the school curriculum, or teaching artists can share the lessons they love most, exposing students to all genres and various writing techniques. Lesson topics include, for example: metaphor and simile, character development, poetic forms, imagery, dialogue, rhythm and rhyme.

Over the course of a workshop, students experience all stages of the writing process, from idea generation to revision to publication. We aim to provide every young writer with the opportunity to perform and publish his or her work—to bring it to life beyond the writing journal. All school workshops culminate with a reading performance on campus, where each student shares an original piece before an audience of students, parents, and teachers. Student work is also published online or in a library-quality journal at the end of the year.