Writing
Nurturing Future Storytellers
At St. Mary’s Episcopal School, we empower our girls to become confident storytellers, equipping them with essential writing skills that prepare them for college and beyond. From technical and creative writing to scientific exploration, our comprehensive approach fosters each student’s unique voice and creativity across all classes and divisions.
From Early Storytelling to Advanced Composition
Early Beginnings
In Senior Kindergarten, students begin their writing journey by crafting journal entries after reading stories with their parents, which they proudly present to the class.
Lower School Excellence
As they progress to Lower School, girls learn to construct well-reasoned claims, cite evidence, and explain their reasoning. By fifth grade, they delve into poetry and songwriting, creating lyrics that are performed during school trips, such as visits to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.
Middle School Mastery
In 6th and 7th grade, students enhance their writing techniques and mechanics through rigorous grammar courses within their literature classes. This foundation prepares them for more advanced writing tasks in Upper School.
Upper School Innovation
Upper School curriculum emphasizes voice development through English courses and beyond. High school students explore diverse writing forms, including journalism with the student-run newspaper, The Tatler, and creative writing for the arts magazine, Belles Lettres.
Writing Across Disciplines
At St. Mary's writing extends beyond traditional English curriculum to include creative and scientific writing assignments across all disciplines.
In seventh and eighth grade science classes, the girls engage in an independent study that results in a scientific research paper.
In Upper School, sophomores write a term paper in history class, on a topic of their choosing, learning the research process and writing an extensive paper.
The culmination of the wide variety of writing experiences is the senior speech tradition. Every member of the senior class works alongside English faculty to write an inspiring senior speech she then presents in Chapel.
In addition, each year, students from first grade to senior year, participate in the May’s Writing Contest, our school-wide annual fiction-writing competition.
My favorite moment is after much brainstorming, pre-writing, and deleting, when a student finally finds the story she wants to tell and the right words to express it. You can see it on her face – relief, joy, success – and it is pretty great.Shari Ray, Upper School English Teacher and Department Chair