Thirty weeks of living books and real writing, built around one question a twelve-year-old already cares about: what makes a place your own?
Two novels carry the year — children sent away from London in wartime, and a girl in occupied Denmark who is asked to be braver than she feels. The writing grows out of the reading, a week at a time, until a student who began with four lines about home finishes a researched paper of their own.
Short works first, so the habits are in place before a novel asks for them.
The same shape every week, so a student knows where they are.
- A passage worth keeping Browning, Hopkins, Tennyson, Wordsworth. Copy it, notice how it is built, keep it all week — and it becomes the week’s dictation.
- One language strand Just one: specific nouns this week, something else the next. Taken from the sentences they are already reading.
- A narration Told or written, with a model to read first — a letter home, a short poem, a scene retold from someone else’s side.
- A question to sit with One real question, the kind without a tidy answer. “Why does the book give us the losing first?”
- A picture and a piece of music A painting to look at for one full minute and describe from memory; a composer to keep company with all term.
- A note for the teacher What this week is doing and why — written for the adult, not the student.
The paper is not assigned and then collected. It is built in the open, one step a week, beginning while the novel is still being read — so the question comes from something the student actually wondered about, and the last week is for finishing rather than starting.
Nature Days and project weeks set the writing down on purpose. A year that never lets up is not rigorous, only tiring — and a student who has been outside all morning has more to say, not less.
A student who spends a year on what it means to belong somewhere does not come out of it only a better writer.