HuckleBerry
Center for Creative Learning
Holly Van Houten
Students will receive instruction from Holly Van Houten, who has decades of experience preparing young writers with the skills they need to succeed. In addition to teaching Literature and Writing at The HuckleBerry Center for Creative Learning, in Valencia, California since 2009, Holly taught in the USC Freshman Writing Department for 10 years, while completing her Ph.D. coursework in English and American Literature. Holly has also taught in the English departments at Pepperdine University, California State University, Northridge, and California State University, Long Beach. She has helped young scholars become confident writers for over 30 years and has successfully prepared students of all abilities for college-level writing.
The Writing Workshop LIVE ONLINE
Homework: 1-2 hours/week
Location: Live Online Class
Prerequisites: Students should be able to write several sentences on a single topic.
This year-long class is designed to introduce students to the organizational techniques and analytical strategies they’ll need to become strong and effective writers. Students can join at any point during the year to work on specific skills! Writing well is an essential skill that will help students succeed in all their classes. Whether a student is an enthusiastic writer or a bit reluctant, this class will strengthen skills and lay the foundation for future success. Learning to write well involves mastering the parts of an essay before building towards the whole, which is why the in the Fall Quarter, we work on creating Powerful Paragraphs, and then move on in the Winter Quarter to create Effective Essays, and then in the Spring Quarter students learn the basics of Researched Writing to support their ideas. This class will take students step by step through the process of creating a strong essay. If they’ve written essays before, this class will provide valuable practice and experience. If this is their first time expanding their ideas to essay length, they’ll learn the fundamentals.
Many students combine this course with Holly’s “Adventure Book Club” class, which teaches students literary elements through great adventure novels. That class includes some writing as well, but it is all done in class. Combining these two classes allows students to enjoy exciting literature while also working on their essay writing skills.
FALL: POWERFUL PARAGRAPHS: During the Fall Quarter, students will learn to structure, develop, and support their ideas by writing paragraphs that effectively focus on specific topics. Students will learn to break down larger topics into sub-categories and organize their ideas about that topic in a way that helps the reader follow along and understand their ideas. We will move from individual paragraphs to multi-paragraph essays, learning how different paragraphs function in an essay.
WINTER: EFFECTIVE ESSAYS: During the Winter Quarter, students will practice a variety of development strategies to help them organize and expand their ideas. They will practice classification, comparison/contrast, and cause and effect analysis, all of which will help them build their critical thinking skills. It can sometimes be challenging for students to know how to begin working on a writing assignment, so learning these different approaches will give students a toolkit they can draw upon whenever they are stumped. They will quickly recognize how to use these tried-and-true analytical strategies and more easily be able to begin a writing project, avoiding the dreaded “writer’s block.”
SPRING: RESEARCHED WRITING: During the Spring Quarter, students will work on adding research to their writing. The internet can be a great resource, but students need to learn to recognize what information is trustworthy and what is not! In this class, students learn to evaluate and choose reliable sources for academic writing, incorporate quotations into their own essays, and analyze those quotes to help readers understand how they are using sources to support their ideas. Students will learn how to create a bibliography of their sources and properly their cite sources using MLA citation style.