Fitz is remarkable as a writing teacher for his help with technique, for his impressive role-modeling, and for his inspiring personality. I wanted to write well when I wrote for Fitz!
~Paul Michaud
Winner of The Groton School Writing Prize, 2018
Explore Your Passion...
See what a Crafted Word Summer Blog looks like
Testimonials
John has tutored all three of my boys. He engages his students with a creative, effective and dynamic toolset that includes technology, humor, compassion and a deep knowledge of students to enhance and deepen his or her writing skills and self-confidence.
~Gari Palmer
When Jack entered Fenn in 4th grade he literally could not sit and write two sentences together. He could speak without hesitation to any adult and share his ideas but to put those thoughts on paper was an enormous challenge - there would literally be tears. As his mother, it was heartbreaking to watch. He was so creative and had so many wonderful ideas, he just did not know how to express himself on paper. In his words, he thought he was ‘dumb’...
Thankfully, Fitz became his teacher and they started doing something called “blogging”. Jack and his friends started writing and sharing their stories, and I remember hearing myself saying “Jack, will you STOP writing!” I had tried for years to get him to write, now he has Fitz for one semester and I can’t get him to stop!
~Maureen Pellegrini
There is no person you know better than yourself, and there is no better way to share your breadth and depth than through the power of a Crafted Word Blog. Blogging, done right, is a lot of fun—and it works to make you a better writer. It really, really works!
- Explore your passions, hobbies, and interests in a variety of digital formats
- Get your own password-protected blog on a full-featured, highly respected blogging platform
- Control your digital footprint and present the best of who and what you are
- Join a small and supportive peer community of Crafted Word bloggers
- Recieve weekly writing prompts, video tutorials and helpful and kind comments on everything you post
- Utilize the helpful rubrics and resources of TheCraftedWord.org
- Learn from an experienced blogger, writer and English teacher with over fifteen years of classroom experience teaching writing and digital media
- Practice and perfect your skills as a writer, photographer, podcaster, and video artist
- Create a positive, powerful and compelling digital portfolio
Open the toggles to learn more about The Crafted Word blogs...
What is a Crafted Word Blog?
The Crafted Word Summer blogs are created, guided, and monitored by an experienced teacher with over fifteen years teaching writing and digital content creation with students of all ages. All blogs are password-protected private blogs hosted on a secure and easy-to-access platform. Timely, supportive and specific feedback is provided on every writing piece, podcast, and video that is posted.
What kind of stuff can I do?
In short--anything! But there is also a weekly curriculum that can be followed.
Using a series of writing prompts, rubrics, and tutorials, students cultivate their narrative voice, share what is important to them and develop skills that are critical in our digital age. These can include daily journaling; book, movie and gaming reviews; sports reports and analysis; narratives about summer experiences; sharing unique hobbies; posting slideshows, videos, and podcasts, or even to create a blog dedicated to a single personal passion a student wishes to explore in a profound way.
Message or Call 978-793-1553
Testimonial
John Fitzsimmons has a love for the mechanics of writing and a powerful command of the written word. The magic is in his overall approach to life. Time with him is a gift to your child. While they are becoming stronger writers and meeting their project goals, they are absorbing John’s life lessons on practicality, positivity, hard work and generosity.
~Anne Elton
Learn & Practice Time-Tested Skills
Online Summer Reading & Writing
The Crafted Word Writer’s Toolbox is a series of three comprehensive, age-based courses helping students in grades 4-12 to learn, develop and practice strong writing and reading skills with an experienced writer and teacher of writing.
Each self-paced course consists of four separate units that can be completed at any time over the course of the summer. The content of each course builds covers the same topics and skills; however, Levels II and III cover these skills in deeper, broader and more nuanced ways. If a student shows proficiency in a level, he or she may enroll in a higher course, regardless of age.
All coursework work is accessed online via iTunes U, a learning management systems used by thousands of schools around the world. It easy to use on an iPad or iPhone–or, if needed, a shared document version of the course is also available.
What You Get!
A Dynamic and Interactive Learning Platform
All course content, including private discussion threads, is accessed through the Itunes app and can be completed and submitted on an iPad or iPhone. All a student needs to do is paste the code–and the whole course is available to use in a self-paced time.
Timely, Clear & Consistent Feedback
Students receive timely and specific feedback on all work. Each submission is guided and assessed with audio and written feedback, as well as private discussion threads for each assignment.
Essential Sentence Building Techniques
A series of exercises, tips, tricks and techniques to help create clear, concise and compelling sentences.
Paragraph Writing
Rubric-based paragraph construction to help writers craft unified and insightful narrative, analytical, and expository paragraphs based on clear topics and themes.
Punctuation Rules and Practices
Includes Fitz’s Top Ten Comma Rules, semi-colons, colons, ellipses, long dashes and other tricks and uses of effective punctuation.
Grammar Rules and Conventions
90% of all writing mistakes can be traced to ten common writing errors. Students will learn proper usage and learn how to avoid these common mistakes.
Essay Writing
Each unit will include a study of an effective personal essay and an opportunity for a student to create his or her own essay, including memoirs, personal narratives, persuasive arguments and literary analysis.
Vocabulary
Quizlet-based studying of the top 100 SAT words, literary terms, homophone exercises, and the top 100 roots.
Reading
Each unit has its own short story shown to have “stood the test of time ” for its literary value and quality of writing. Students are guided towards writing insightful and well-constructed literary analysis and personal reading responses.
Poetry & Song
In each unit, students will study and explicate a genre-specific poem selected for its age-appropriateness and literary quality. It includes poems written in a variety of poetic genres including ballads, free-verse, blank verse, sonnets, haiku, and epic poetry.
Journaling
Each student is encouraged to face the empty page and engage the possibilities that only a journal can offer. The habit of writing in a continual and thoughtful way is critical to developing fluency and skills as a writer, and it is the quickest and most effective way to develop a true literary lifestyle.
Creative Media
We live in a changing world, and the ways in which we can deliver our words has changed, too. Every Writers Toolbox unit includes options to create podcasts, interactive books, videos and presentations that can be shared in a beautiful and compelling digital portfolio or in public or private Crafted Word blog.
Answers to Common questions...
How do I get all this stuff…
The course is set up using an easy to use online learning system. We send you an email with a code that automatically enrolls you in the course—and then all of this “stuff” is right there for you to access to all of the materials and resources and for us to give you feedback and help you as you work through each unit.
How much time does each unit take…
To do it well, you will probably need to spend 8-10 hours on each unit, which, if spread over the summer, is less than an hour per day. You could also power through it in a week! Everything depends on how you work best, but it is certainly a good skill to learn to use time wisely and productively–and you can spread the units out over the entire summer or you can put in some extra time for one or two weeks and get it done sooner, so don’t worry if you are away at camp for a while or on a fun summer trip.
Will it really help me…
Yes; it really will help you! In fact, if you earnestly and sincerely “do the work” now, you will more prepared for the assignments that are coming to you in the school year—and you will be able to tackle these assignments with more confidence and ease!
Will you grade my work…
The short answer is no! Two of the guiding principles of The Crafted Word are to “assess” and “reflect.” We do assess all of your work and help you reflect on what you have learned, and most importantly, to write about your experience of what you learned, how you learned it, and how you could possibly “learn better” the next time. Every unit does include self-grading quizzes that you can take and retake until you feel confident that you know your stuff.
I am curious to see what a Writers’ Toolbox unit looks like…
Good! Check out the pdf download. This Level II unit designed for a specific school will be slightly different, but not by much.
You can also contact me and we can discuss any questions you have.
Curious?
Download a Pdf
What levels are taught...
Level I: Grades Four–Six is an introductory course. Each unit requires four to six hours of work, including journaling, narrative paragraphs, and personal reading responses.
Level II: Grades 7–9 builds upon the techniques and skills taught in Level I. Each unit requires eight to ten hours of work, including two 600 word essays.
Level III: Grades 10–12 is our most challenging course. Each unit requires ten to twelve hours of work. The literature is longer and more complex; it covers uses of all punctuation marks, more specific grammar work, extensive vocabulary work, and four 1000 word essays.
$850.00 for Eight Units of Study
Message or Call 978-793-1553
Testimonial
John has tutored all three of my boys. He engages his students with a creative, effective and dynamic toolset that includes technology, humor, compassion and a deep knowledge of students to enhance and deepen his or her writing skills and self-confidence.
~Gari Palmer
No matter how you slice it, prepping for SAT testing is a source of stress for parents and students alike. Fitz can give you a thorough grounding in essential vocabulary, roots & suffixes, grammatical constructions, punctuation, and common writing errors–as well as a foolproof formula for responding to writing and literary responses in clear, concise, and articulate ways!
There is no shortcut to success, but it is essential that any student knows what to expect and how to respond in an experienced and confident manner to multiple-choice tests, essay prompts, and grammatical constructions.
Essay Writing
The bottom line in every writer’s repertoire is—and always has been—to effectively develop and convey a unified theme or thesis in a clear and concise way that engages, expresses and passionately explores an idea that is a joy (and never a chore) for a reader to understand and enjoy as simply a good piece of writing.
The ability to respond articulately to a writing prompt or expectation is an essential skill for life; moreover, being able to embrace the essay forms–whether it be personal narratives, literary analysis, reflective explorations, argumentative or expository statements–is a “skill” that must be practiced, perfected, and mastered from the ground up. It is not something that anyone can “just do.”
At The Crafted Word, we believe that impressive essays evolve out of a painstaking attention to common-sense adherence to detail, foundation building and effective approaches to thesis development, a unified theme, paragraphing and punctuation, tried and true rhetorical techniques, and narrative fluency.
We can help your essay writing become a source of joy and pride in your accomplishments as a writer!
And that is a promise.
Grammar and Mechanics
Even just the word “grammar” sends chills up the spine of any aspiring or struggling student. The often arcane expectations surrounding the study of grammar is often bewildering to well-intentioned students of writing.
At The Crafted Word we do not have a solution, but we do have a reliable, consistent, and simple approach–and that is to learn the most common writing errors and to develop lasting habits that have served the best writers since words were first put to papyrus; moreover, we take a huge step forward by learning, practicing, and mastering the rhetorical techniques that help bring common and enduring thoughts to a sublime and lasting level.
Reading & Vocabulary Skills
All of us have a “weak spot” in our arsenal of literary skills. Understanding the essential themes of literary works and developing an effective approach to understanding complex and specific vocabulary and phrases is crucial to anyone trying to develop and sustain a literate lifestyle.
The Crafted Word helps students develop the skills needed to understand the context and intent of a wide range of multi-genre literature, and to explicate his or her understanding through plot summaries, personal reading responses, and literary analysis.
Kaleigh, Mangiarelli, a teacher at the renowned Landmark School, (and a really cool and engaging writer!) is available all summer to tutor students online with dyslexia and other reading disabilities.
For Rates and Scheduling
Message or Call 978-793-1553
The Crafted Word Blog...
Essays, Reflections, Poems & Songs ...
Fitz is remarkable as a writing teacher for a number of reasons: for his help with technique, for his impressive role-modeling, and for his inspiring personality. I wanted to write well when I wrote for Fitz!
~Paul Michaud
Winner: The Groton School Writing Prize, 2018
With the wit and engaging personality of a born storyteller, Fitz connects with his students and inspires them to write confidently and effectively in their own voices. He taught our son the fundamentals of excellent writing through critical analysis of poetry, song lyrics, classic literature, blogs and video essays. Thanks to Fitz’s guidance and support, our son is excelling at Vanderbilt University.
~Dave Reudiger
John has tutored all three of my boys. He engages his students with a creative, effective and dynamic toolset that includes technology, humor, compassion and a deep knowledge of students to enhance and deepen his or her writing skills and self-confidence.
~Gari Palmer
When the eyes rest on the soul--that's Fitzy
Joshua Sawyer
