FRONTIERA FINISHES LAST OF THREE WORKSHOPS FOR GIRL SCOUTS

In the winter of 2020, award-winning author Deborah K. Frontiera conducted three creative writing workshops for the San Jacinto Girl Scout Council. One in January and one in February 2020 were for Junior Girl Scouts (grades 4 and 5) and earned the girls their “Scribe” badge. This badge involves exposing girls to several different kinds of writing: an article (and with persuasion involved), something about themselves, poetry, and short fiction.

Frontiera likes to involve nature in her prompts and utilizes many pictures stored in her computer over the years. She begins with having participants write three statements about themselves using similes. “I’m as ________ as a ____________ when I ___________.” Or: I’m as slow as a turtle when I get up in the morning. She follows this with teaching the girls how to write Haiku, writing one as a group to demonstrate, and then having the girls write one on their own. For short fiction, she has participants imagine the life of some wild animal with the plot revolving around that animal trying to catch “lunch” or avoid becoming another animal’s “lunch”. Finally, she has the girls write a couple of paragraphs expressing their opinion on why an animal that they admire should be preserved in the natural world, or some other topic on which they can express an opining using the “5 Ws” (who, what, where, when, why). All this is pressed into a two-hour workshop.

For Cadet level scouts (grades 6-8), the two-hour workshop involves steps in writing a script for the "Script Writer" badge. Rather than wasting time on the formatting of a script, Frontiera provides them with a handout for those picky details, and focuses on the process of developing characters and drafting one scene. The girls work in groups of two to three, cooperating during the process. They develop and draw characters from objects like plastic table ware, pencils, paperclips, scissors etc.—after all somebody did very well with Sponge Bob Squarepants. Each group develops and draws characters from the “stuff”, gives them personality and then together, they talk out and write one scene from a possible story line. At the end, each group holds their characters and “performs” their short skit. Such an active workshop is fun as well as instructive, and there is always a lot of light-hearted laughter during the performances.

“Kids get so lock-stepped into writing at school because of standardized testing, so it’s fun to see them be able to be truly creative,” Frontiera says. “It’s not important that they create a ‘perfect’ piece but that they experience the writing process. They can take their work to perfection later on their own.”

Deborah has been working with the San Jacinto Council for several years already with these ideas and hopes to continue in the future. The photo for this article was provided by one of the parents after the last workshop on Feb. 9, which in 2020 corresponded to Scout Sunday.