Friday, May 25, 2007

My First Piece of Writing

I found my first job early this year. I worked for a non-profit organization who needed a teacher to come up with a youth service curriculum. Unlike other curriculum development opportunities, I am the sole author for this project and this involved a comparatively significant amount of money. I must have logged 40 to 50 hours for a 20-page curriculum. But it was all worth it. After all, it was my first.

What about you? What did you write about for your first freelancing assignment?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was putting in volunteer and practicum hours in a classroom while in a teacher training program... a teacher handed me a binder with student writing samples and a basic list of the 6 traits of writing. She asked me to teach lessons on the 6 traits. (there were no lessons in the binder!) I quickly set about developing lessons, then later submitted them to a publisher. It was a new, "hot" topic at the time, so they bought it. I've since done 5 more books on 6 trait writing for them, and 4 books on informational reading. Very exciting, but now in between contracts freelance can be a bit discouraging. My creative ideas keep me going, though!

History Teacher said...

Great idea. I am not sure if I can do something like this in my school district. It's really their intellectual property. This makes me feel reluctant to submit my A work if I want to publish it.

theskett said...

You would definitely have to work with the district regarding publishing rights. I tried to talk with a local district about some curriculum I had written, but I didn't get very far. It seemed they would really rather just purchase/use existing curriculum already published by educational publishers.