“I believe in the power of asking good questions, of prompting and facilitating a prime learning environment. I believe that young writers can be each other’s biggest fans as they build community with their insightful words.”
During summers and winter breaks, Tokyo kids connect with Melissa and with other young readers and authors in the most exciting collaboration and learning experience!
Contact Melissa to begin a conversation and mark your child’s place in her next, upcoming camp!
A strong, impassioned writer is an unstoppable force.
Benefits of TKW to Each Young Person
They certainly surpass these bullet points, but here are a few of the many, rich benefits.
Meeting in our warm, welcoming environment, we do all of this, and more:
*Dreaming up ideas that light us up
*Collaborating in small groups and as a team
*Communicating ideas together verbally and on paper
*Growing Vocabulary
*Honing spelling and grammar
*Developing grit & focus to see a piece through
*Learning to edit & cut what gets in the way of our work
*Revising--being flexible & excited to integrate new plans
*Pitching ideas with confidence
*Publishing, celebrating with friends
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Melissa Uchiyama is a writing specialist and a US National Board Certified teacher, who with over seventeen-years of teaching and mentoring experience. She has led small group classes, whole classrooms in early literacy, emergent literacy, and sophisticated writing programs.
She is a recent judge for a premier student writing contest hosted by Young Inklings, out of California. Melissa keeps her pedagogy and instructional approach relevant and cutting-edge, participating in mentor programs led by Brevity Magazine and Blog writers and editors, Dinty W. Moore and Allison K. Williams.
Melissa has worked one-on-one with essayists and editors like Dianne Jacob, who has herself earned Grand prize winner in the MFK Fisher Awards for Excellence in Culinary Writing, Les Dames Escoffier, and Best Essay, in the Association of Food Journalists. Included in Best Food Writing anthology, 2016.
As a writer, she has been a finalist in essay contests hosted by Women on Writing, competing with writers around the world.
Melissa has been published in such places as Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Japan Times, Kyoto Journal, Brevity, in Taste, within anthologies, and additional journals. She continues to pursue the art of writing, working with prominent poets and best-selling authors, keeping relevant within innovative writing and editing strategies.
Melissa recognizes the variety of needs and communities, both in south Florida, where she began, to the Japanese and international families that make up Tokyo.
