"Write Through Chicago" offers both teachers and students a unique opportunity to connect with Chicago and its remarkable history. Young writers will mourn at Lincoln's Chicago Funeral, marvel at the Columbian Exposition, gather with the crowd at the Haymarket Riot, drive to Riverview Amusement Park, chomp down on the first McDonald's Burger, and celebrate at Grant Park as Barack Obama delivers his presidential acceptance speech. They'll craft a wide range of written forms, from stories and poems to polemics, monologues, diaries, letters and more. All "Write Through Chicago" writing activities align to NCTE & Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and are supported by a website that provides students with ready access to specifically selected research materials. This unique design leaves teachers free to concentrate on helping students truly "learn about a city by writing about a city."
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...Larson ("The Creative Writing Handbook," 1992) and Boone ("Forest High," 2011) collaborate to produce a guide primarily for students, although it'd be useful for anyone "curious about Chicago and anxious to write." Their guide covers nearly a dozen of the nationwide Common Core State Standards for writing, including orienting students to the rhetorical forms of argument, exposition and narrative, and to disciplines like planning, revising and rewriting. The authors approach their task by presenting students with a series of archived headlines from different pivotal points in Chicago history, from the days of fur trader Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable in 1790 to the passage through town of President Lincoln's funeral train in 1865 to the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871, as well as the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, the World Series of 1906 and newly elected Barack Obama's victory speech from 2008. In all these cases and many more, the authors encourage writing students to extrapolate from the headline and quick bullet points of the event, with pointed motivations to consider as many angles as possible, such as the president's Secret Service detail or the engineers on Lincoln's train. It's also recommended for students to go online for further research and to imagine how they would have reacted at the time. Finally, students are encouraged to envision a new scenario spun off from the headline's setting but involving them personally. In all cases, students are carefully guided through the use of educator Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Objectives, first using so-called lower-level thinking (knowledge, comprehension and application) and then higher-level thinking (analysis, synthesis and evaluation). The headlines are well-chosen to represent a wide range of interests-everything from the social reforms of Jane Addams and Hull House to the poetry of Carl Sandburg and the prose of Studs Terkel-and the concept of making writing exercises come alive through local history is an inspired one.
A stimulating, well-presented approach to getting students interested in writing.
"Write Through Chicago" is the best present an English teacher could receive. This book brings to the forefront a logical yet creative way of addressing what is truly important: engaging students to think creatively and insightfully about the world around them. By allowing students to write themselves into Chicago history, Larson and Boone have seamlessly brought together the best parts of teaching and writing. This is the kind of book that makes teachers want to teach.
"-Deborah Will, former President, Illinois Association of Teachers of English"