"She's so excited and ambitious each session to keep writing and develop her story. I always look forward to our sessions because even while she's so productive, we still manage to have fun," says Nate, one of her tutors.

Week Three, Week Three, Week Three! We're already halfway through the program and can't believe it. During this session, our students worked hard on their stories, writing until page thirteen! To the right is a photo of tutor Lillie Tynch with students Vivienne and Sydney.

It's already week two! Our students went over important adjectives and adverbs and began writing their stories. Here's a photo of tutor Kavya Shankar and student Vivienne K. Vivienne made a lot of drawings during this session for her story... look at how creative she is! You can see the drawings of the plane she'll include in her story, which is about a girl named Annie who goes to the wrong airport!

The Kids Can Write Program has begun its second program at Virginia Tech! We're continuing to tutor at Gilbert Linkous Elementary School, and are so excited to work with our fifteen new students thrilled to become published authors. This week, they created their character summaries and drew their timeline maps. 

Today, we had our Concluding Ceremony to celebrate our 15 students who finished their books and became official authors! It was such a wonderful experience to meet all of the parents and give our students their Gold Star Trophies and Certificates of Achievement! This whole semester has been such an invaluable experience that we'll all cherish with us forever.

Today was our final session before the Program Concluding Ceremony! Our students published their books and ordered them on Amazon, wrote their thoughts on the program, and took photos with their tutors. It has been such a wonderful journey to witness each student go from thinking of a character, to creating an entire world for them to thrive in, and publishing their own stories. It has been an invaluable experience for each of us tutors to witness the power of creativity and dedication.

This week, our students finished writing their books! We worked on finalizing the covers and completing final edits in the stories. They also created "About Me" pages in their books. Most students will have even published their books by our next session!! 

Covers Covers Covers!! During Week Four, our students had the chances to create their Book Covers with their Tutors through the Kindle Direct Publishing Platform! They were so creative with creating their covers on the platform. Each student had a different cover photo to display what their books were about, and some students even drew pictures for their cover photo!

Today we'll be featuring tutor Zavier and student Annie! "My student Annie must be the most talented artist I have ever seen at her age. She’s doing all the illustrations for her book which is about a kitty getting lost in the woods who learns to not stray too far from her parents. Along the way she meets Max the Dog and finds pretty flowers," Zavier said.

During Week Three, we worked on staying on track in the plot of the stories! The tutors helped their students make a revised timeline map and work with their students to get the books to about 20 pages. By next week, all of the students will have accounts made on the publishing website, and we'll begin working on the book covers!

Week Two was all about learning important things to keep in mind while writing and helping our students reach 16 pages in their books! Before our third week session, they're going to learn more about the self-publishing process as they went home with a "How To" pamphlet that teaches how to use Kindle Direct Publishing online. 

This is a photo of our tutor team walking to Gilbert Linkous Elementary School for our first session on 9/30/22!