A recent letter from parents:
“We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your ongoing contributions to our child’s skills as a young writer. Your real life experiences as writer, use of books to spur creativity, and flexible approach towards working with young writers is truly a talent. We also very much appreciate your writing camps as you bring young writers together, thereby creating an environment of constructive learning and fun.
Our child’s confidence towards writing has improved and we believe its bolstered by the fact that you yourself are an accomplished writer and therefore understand the process by which to help young writers grow. Again we thank you for your ongoing support and effort!”
I work with young writers to support their ideas. Whether it is gaining the rich details and specific vocabulary, or the art of organizing thoughts into crystalline plans and paragraphs, I support the whole writing process, using specific skills from the professional writing world.
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.
Melissa has been published within newspapers, journals, and in anthologies as an essayist, poet, book reviewer, and food and travel writer. She is published in such places as The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), The Japan Times, The Epoch Times, Kyoto Journal, in Taste, Literary Mama, Brain Child, Kveller, The Sunlight Press, and within anthologies like Mothering Through the Darkness and Knocked Up Abroad Again.
She works one-on-one with prominent poets and best-selling authors, keeping relevant within innovative writing and editing strategies.
Melissa believes that helping young people become strong writers will serve them within multiple languages, through relationships, careers, and within every calling and season of their lives. Writing and language, similar to other fine arts, can bridge gaps and bring forward quick and thorough growth.