The Writing Course
2026–2027

This document is the course. It defines the year's goals, the quarter-by-quarter map with due dates, and — most importantly — the protocols used to run it day to day: how each daily handout gets generated, how completed work gets evaluated, and how the course gets steered as we learn what's working. Individual lessons are not pre-written; they are created each morning from the recipe in §6, aimed at whatever the skills tracker (§5) says matters right now. That is by design: the research says responsive teaching beats a fixed script, and it keeps the course steerable all year.

§1How to use this document

• Daily: open a session with the AI, reference this plan, and generate the handout(s) for today (and tomorrow, if printing ahead) using the protocol in §6. Customize on the spot — swap the topic, shrink the assignment, lean into whatever she's currently obsessed with.
• After each assignment: her finished work goes in writing/completed/. Run the evaluation protocol in §7 — conference, then feedback note — and update the skills tracker.
• At each milestone date: check the quarter map (§4). Milestones are the fixed points; everything between them flexes.
• Whenever the course needs to change: use §8. Edit this document, bump the version, note the change in §9. The plan serves the writer, not the other way around.

§2Course goals — what June looks like

By the end of May 2027, the student will have:

1. Written and published in all three modes. At least one polished narrative, one informative/research piece, and one full argument essay, each taken through the complete process (plan → draft → feedback → revise → edit → share with a real audience). This covers the full 8th grade standard.
2. A repeatable writing process she can describe. She can say how she plans, what she does when a draft stalls, and what she looks for when revising — the explicit-strategy outcome the research ranks first. Built deliberately, not hoped for: each quarter teaches one named strategy (named on its §4 card), modeled aloud and handed over until she reaches for it unprompted (§6).
3. Sentence-level command. Comma splices gone from final drafts; varied sentence openers; comfortable use of subordinate clauses and because/but/so reasoning. Built through daily ten-minute drills, never worksheets.
4. Clean dialogue and paragraphing. Correct dialogue punctuation and deliberate multi-sentence paragraphs — her two most mechanical growth areas from the August baseline.
5. Show-don't-tell as a habit, not a trick. Emotions dramatized through action, dialogue, and sensory detail rather than named.
6. A capstone she's proud of — a sustained Q4 project of her choosing (illustrated storybook, animation script + storyboard, or collected works), printed or produced for a real audience.
7. An intact love of writing. The non-negotiable. She started this year voluntarily writing 1,100-word stories with subverted endings; the course must end with that enthusiasm larger, not smaller. Every protocol below (limited feedback, choice of topics, real audiences) exists partly to protect this.

§3The weekly rhythm

The same shape every school week, all four quarters. Content changes; the rhythm doesn't.

§4The year at a glance — and each quarter in detail

Four quarters, each anchored in one mode, sequenced to start where her enthusiasm already is. Dates follow the school calendar; due dates are the fixed milestones. Weekly technique order within a quarter is a menu, not a schedule — pick based on the tracker and what her current piece needs. The Friday ship rhythm (§3) runs all year: the Q1 table below maps every ship — targets, not tests; only capstone dates are fixed. Q2–Q4 tables name the anchor milestones only, and what the in-between Fridays ship gets decided at each quarterly review.

Breaks: Labor Day Sep 7 · Fall Break Oct 5–16 · Thanksgiving Nov 25–27 · Winter Break Dec 23–Jan 4 · MLK Jan 18 and Presidents' Day Feb 15 (unless used for make-up) · Spring Break Mar 15–26. No milestones land adjacent to a break re-entry; first week back is always a soft week.

§5The skills tracker

The tracker is the course's steering signal: a short list of current teaching points, drawn from her actual work, that daily drills and lesson choices aim at. It lives here and gets updated by the evaluation protocol (§7). Keep it to 3–5 active items — more than that and nothing gets focused attention. When an item stops appearing in her drafts for three consecutive pieces, retire it (move it to "Secured") and promote something new.

Active teaching points (baseline: August 2026, from Lessons 1–2)

Secured skills (name them in feedback; keep them warm)

• Complete story architecture — plans before drafting, real arcs
• Willing revision — genuinely improves drafts without being forced
• Narrative risk-taking — subverted endings, emotional beats
• Natural dialogue content (the words, if not yet the punctuation)
• Voluntary volume — meets or exceeds word counts unprompted

§6Lesson generation protocol — how each handout gets made

Lessons are generated the morning of (or the night before), one or two at a time, by you + the AI, using this recipe. This is the section to reference when you sit down and say "make today's handout."

The strategy through-line (slower than the lesson cycle)

Craft techniques change lesson to lesson; strategies — the named, reusable procedures for planning and revising — run on a quarterly cycle instead. Each §4 card names the quarter's one strategy. The teaching arc, per SRSD: talk it through → model it aloud → she memorizes it → supported use → independent use. Two rules make it stick: advance by criterion, not calendar — a strategy is learned when she reaches for it unprompted on a new piece — and pair it with self-regulation: she sets the piece's goal from the strategy, checks her own steps off before handing work in, and says afterward what worked. Handouts reference the current strategy by name whenever the assignment involves planning or revising.

Every handout follows this template

1. Header: lesson number (continuous — STATUS.md tracks the next number), date, and the technique named in plain words as one plain sentence ("Making fear visible without saying 'afraid'").
2. Warm-up (10 min minimum): one sentence drill targeting an active tracker item (§5), built from content she currently cares about — her own story, her current book, dragons, ferrets, Minecraft.
3. Freewrite (10 min minimum): on every handout, every day. Never graded — stream-of-consciousness with no rules to follow — but turned in with the day's work; one prompt offered, her own choice always wins.
4. Mini-lesson: the technique explained briefly, then shown working in a short mentor-text excerpt — ideally from a book she loves. One "how did the author do this?" question.
5. Writing Assignment: one labeled section ("Writing Assignment: ‹name›") holding the whole task as complete sentences, with specific, countable requirements, never "write well." Good: "Write the scene so we know Clara is terrified without using afraid, scared, terrified, or fear. Include at least two sensory details. Aim for 400–600 words." Bad: "add more description."
6. Checklist: 3–4 concrete success criteria she can self-check before handing it in — including the current strategy's steps when the task involves planning or revising. These same criteria drive the evaluation in §7.
7. Stretch: one harder variation, printed as a normal part of the day — the handout never labels it optional ("optional", "only if", "if you want"). The parent decides on the day whether it's skippable and tells her directly.

Delivery: model it live

The mini-lesson is a demonstration, not a reading. Before she uses the technique, try it yourself in front of her on a sentence or two of your own — thinking aloud, false starts and crossed-out verbs included. The messy middle is the lesson: a classroom teacher can rarely afford it; you can. (Model → practice → reflect is the strongest-evidence teaching cycle in the secondary-writing practice guide.)

Voice and format rules

• The handout talks to the student, directly and warmly, in a calm teacher's voice — playful at most once per page and never in a heading; never babyish, never corny. She's a smart 8th grader who reads.
• Sized to her, not to a generic 8th grader. Volume is the engine: writing itself is the best writing teacher, reading a close second. The assignment must genuinely fill the writing block for a writer of her demonstrated volume — the floor comes from the Challenge dial in STATUS.md "Parent notes" (authoritative, read every run). If she could finish in ten minutes, it was too small: raise the word floor, add a required technique, or deepen the revision demand — never pad with busywork.
• One page when possible, two max. Printable: black-on-white friendly, room to write if the task is short.
• Use her interests as material, not as decoration — a drill sentence about ferrets is good because it's a good drill, not because a ferret clipart is on the page.
• On full-process-piece days, the "handout" may just be a planning sheet, a revision checklist, or a feedback-response sheet — the template flexes.

Customization is expected at this step, every day — swap the mentor text, change the topic to this week's obsession, halve the assignment on a low-energy day, or abandon the plan entirely because she asked a great question yesterday. The technique-menu items are the checklist; the order and flavor are yours.

§7Evaluation protocol — what happens to completed work

Completed assignments land in writing/completed/ (established format: planning answers + rough draft + completed version in one file; she works in Google Docs and sends the doc when finished — it's printed for her and archived here). Then, together with the AI:

1. Evaluate against that lesson's checklist criteria (headed "Checklist"; lessons 4–7 used "You nailed it if…") — not against everything writing could ever be. Did she use the technique the lesson taught?
2. Scan against the skills tracker. Which active items showed up? Which didn't? Any candidate for retirement, or a new pattern worth adding?
3. Hold the conference, then write the feedback note. Feedback is a conversation first (§3): she talks first about what she was trying to do, you respond as a reader, and the note records what was said. The fixed format:
   • One genuine strength, named precisely, with her exact words quoted back. ("'I suppose if you must,' said with fear — that line does characterization and plot at once.")
   • One teaching point. One. Usually the next lesson's seed.
4. Log a one-line evaluation note (date, piece, criteria met, tracker observations, next-lesson seed) so the next generation session can read the trail.

Quarterly review

In the last week of each quarter: re-read the quarter's completed folder together, pick her best piece and her favorite piece (they may differ — good conversation), write a short growth memo (what improved, with before/after quotes; what's next), and update the tracker and next quarter's plan. If a grade is ever needed for records, it's assigned holistically from the quarter's body of work at this review — mastery of the quarter's techniques, completion of milestones — not averaged from pieces.

§8Steering the course

This plan is a starting map, and the territory will disagree with it. Rules for changing it:

• Fixed: the weekly rhythm (§3), the one-technique-per-lesson rule, the feedback format, the three modes each getting a quarter, and the capstone due dates.
• Flexible by design: everything else — technique order, project topics, piece lengths, which mentor texts, intermediate milestone dates (slide up to a week without ceremony; note it in §9).
• If she's ahead: don't accelerate the calendar — deepen. Longer pieces, harder mentor texts, an extra genre inside the quarter's mode (poetry, comics script, letters).
• If a milestone is slipping: shrink the piece, not the process. A 400-word story that goes through plan-draft-feedback-revise-share teaches more than a 1,500-word draft that dies in a folder.
• If enthusiasm dips: that's a course emergency ahead of any milestone. Drop to freewrites + reading like a writer for a week, change the project topic to the current obsession, and add an audience (mail something to someone). Volume follows interest; skill follows volume.
• Mid-quarter check (calendar it, ~week 5 of each quarter): Is she writing more or less than in August? Which lesson did she talk about at dinner? What's she reading, and is it in the lessons yet?

§9Change log