Young Authors Workshop: Empowering Children’s Voices
As parents, you already know that your children have active imaginations, strong opinions, and unique personalities. These elements are the basis of who they are and who they will become. Children are the future, and we want a future where people stand up and use their voices. This confidence in one’s own voice has to be built at a young age.
Public speaking is one way to build this confidence, but it can overwhelm and even terrify many children. Writing on the other hand seems less daunting. They can do it in the comfort of their own homes. There’s no big stage our filled auditorium to play on their nerves. In the classroom, writing is often used to draw the shy and introverted children out of their shells. But it can do so much more than that. By publishing our students’ work, we have seen the confidence it brings them. They get to see their name listed as author and their book sitting on a bookshelf right next to the books written by the authors they look up to. Having the physical copy of the book gives them validity - their words were important enough to publish in a book.
Parents are often surprised by the complex ideas and topics their children write about in our programs: poems on politics, stories about the differences between dreams and reality, and essays on their own relationships with friends and teammates. All written by elementary and middle school students. Your children have so much they want and need to say, but they don’t always know how or when to express it. As a parent, you have to find those opportunities for them. Especially now, as we are living in unprecedented times. With school and home being turned upside down and twisted all around, children need outlets for their emotions. Writing can be that outlet.
In our virtual summer camp, we allow the students the freedom to write about topics that interest them, we are not there to police their ideas or change their stories. Instead, we want to help enhance their writing while encouraging them to think about what draws them to writing, why they want to tell this story, and how they can get their ideas across to their readers. For many of our campers, it’s the first time they are being asked to consider their own voice as important. They begin to realize that their words have the same weight as the words of their parents and teachers. One camper from last year summed it up perfectly, she said we write to create “stories that our children and their children [can] pass on and [to make sure] you’re on the right side of history”. There is no denying that she understands the power of her words. Whether your child joins our virtual summer camp or just writes at home on loose-leaf paper empowers their voice, it’s the voice of the future and the world needs to hear it.
-Dieneria Brown
