Our college essay writing workshop has moved to a virtual space. College-bound juniors and seniors who need support in writing their application essays should join us on November 14th. The workshop will be between 10 AM – 12 PM. Students who want extra support can come back between 1-4 pm for an individualized check in.
Students who attend the workshop will automatically be entered in a raffle for a chromebook! The workshop is free and sign up is required. Sign up today!
“Homer Plessy deserves a monument because he doesn’t have one and he’s brave and strong with words.” —Jibril
“Crawfish need a monument because the crawfish are the food of the state. Crawfish are yummy to some people and lots of people eat crawfish here in New Orleans.” —Nataleigh
“Ellen deserves a monument because she is awesome. How do you feel about Ellen DeGeneres?” —Blake
Written by third graders at Homer A. Plessy Community School and filled with who and what they believe should replace the Confederate monuments in New Orleans, Courageous, Eccentric, Diverse is now available for purchase!
Ms. Amy’s third grade class spent two weeks selecting, researching, and writing with Big Class volunteers and staff. They also made original art pieces for the book, showing what their monuments would look like in place of the removed Confederate ones. From Ruby Bridges to alligators, Trombone Shorty to beignets, pelicans to Eli Manning, this book is a celebration of a new era of New Orleans’s public space—space meant for all people.
Click here to order Courageous Eccentric, Diverse in time for the holiday season.
Big Class is coming back into classrooms with a new workshop series, situated in the present moment in our city and our schools. As schools plan to unify under one central school district by the summer of 2018, it is an opportune time for those who will be most affected by this plan–students–to voice their concerns, hopes, and dreams for how schools should look.
A Good Troublemaker is a person who sees something that needs to be changed to make the world better, and does something to try to change it. There are lots of ways to be a Good Troublemaker; Big Class calls for change through writing.
This fall, Good Troublemakers workshops will be held in classrooms around the city to gather input from students ages 6-18 about their school and their thoughts about what schools in New Orleans can and should be. The writing produced in these workshops will contribute to a proposal for school redesign, written by young New Orleanians and published by Big Class.
Click here to apply and bring Good Troublemakers to your classroom.
As Big Class becomes 826 New Orleans in 2017, we will officially open the Haunting Supply Company–a one-stop-shop for the city’s ghostly denizens. Inside our creative storefront, you’ll find human disguises, pre-creaked floorboards, corporeal dust, and other staples for the supernatural.
This fall, Big Class’s Spooky Stories workshops will be coming to classrooms to write ghost stories inspired by images in and around New Orleans–the most haunted city in America. This collection of student writing will contribute to Big Class’s first ever anthology of ghost stories, to be released this October.
Bring local writers to your classroom to lead your students in writing their own eerie tales about the Crescent City. Workshops will begin after Labor Day and run for most of September. These workshops are open to grades 1-12, and will be tailored to age groups accordingly!
In response to last week’s election results Big Class is pushing into classrooms across the city to facilitate letter-writing workshops to help young people process and share their voice about the election and the issues surrounding it. All of the work will be collected in a chapbook published by Big Class.
We need volunteers to help with this effort. Over the next few weeks we’ll be scheduling these workshops during school hours (9:00-4:00). We are still developing the schedule with teachers so if you’re interested in working one-on-one or in small groups with students to help them write these pieces, and if you have availability within that window, email eliza@bigclass.org so we can add you to a list of potential volunteers. You’ll receive additional details as we schedule these engagements.
Finally, we will also need Spanish-speaking volunteers. If that’s you, let me know as well!
Over the past month, Big Class has hosted weekly zine-writing workshops at Alvar Library, and has partnered with the incredible teen program at Norman Mayer Library for an array of workshops.
Collectively, workshop goers have created over fifty pieces of individual writing, and have taken nearly one hundred photos! A summer anthology of all edited work to date will published in late July.
Check out our last workshop of the Summer Saturday, July 23rd 2-4:30 pm at Norman Mayer Library. Join visiting teen writer Keith Riley from Atlanta as he facilitates a free-verse poetry workshop for teens!
And our gallery exhibition and book release July 28 from 4:30-6:30, also at Norman Mayer Library
