Write Through Chicago: Learn About a City by Writing About a City

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.”

Deborah Will, former President, Illinois Association of Teachers of English: “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.”

Richard Reeder, author, Chicago Sketches: “In this era of social media saturation, coherent writing often finds itself sorely missing from the toolbox of today’s students. Thankfully Write Through Chicago provides students with imaginative learning tasks that allow them to discover the people, places and events that comprise the rich history of Chicago through writing and other forms of creative expression. Boone and Larson’s book should be on the desk of every Social Studies teacher in Chicago.”

Peter Kahn, Spoken Word and Black Literature Educator, Oak Park and River Forest High School: “Write Through Chicago will introduce teachers and students to the people, places and events—from Gwendolyn Brooks to Riverview to the Beatles at Comiskey Park—that have built up Chicago’s bulky shoulders. As Studs Terkel said, ‘I hope that memory is valued—that we do not lose memory.’ Write Through Chicago will make Chicago’s history memorable to teachers and students alike.”

Laura Dershewitz, Test Development Supervisor; Gifted Program Coordinator: “Write Through Chicago is like time travel. The assignments lead students into exciting moments in the past, letting them document what they observe, feel, and think along the way. The brilliance of the book is that it enlists writing to help young people channel their natural fascination with what happened before their own time.”

Longtime teachers and writers Mark Henry Larson and Bob Boone have collaborated for more than thirty years. Along with coauthoring Write Through Chicago, they have written two other creative writing books, Moe's Cafe and Joan's Junk Shop. They have taught an online creative writing course for Northwestern University's Center for Talent Development and now manage a website for teachers, writethroughamerica.com. Larson and Boone also conduct workshops to help teachers incorporate creative writing into their classrooms. In the future they plan to establish a center for the support of creative writing. On his own, Boone has written a sports biography, a memoir, and a collection of short stories. Larson is the coauthor of the Creative Writing Handbook and various articles on writing and teaching.

KIRKUS REVIEWS
www.kirkusreviews.com
...Useful for anyone "curious about Chicago and anxious to write."...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....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....Students are encouraged to envision a new scenario spun off from the headline's setting but involving them personally....Students are carefully guided through the use of educator Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Objectives...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.