Scary Good Writing with Mr Butt and Bonefish

In 2006, my son's fourth grade teacher learned that I had written 17 books including nine children's books for Random House and had taught writing to fourth and sixth graders as well as at-risk juvenile offenders. So, she asked me to help teach writing to her class and I accepted. Over the next four years, I had tons of fun and we increased student's writing assessment scores to the highest ever at the school. In the process, I ended up with a writing course that kids really love.

I use humor and lots of it. Studies have found that participants who were exposed to a series of lectures containing course-specific humor demonstrated increased retention of the course-content information as compared to those who received the same material without the infusion of humor. In addition, other researchers have found that humor can result in better information recall and can increase long term retention. (Humor, Analogy, and Metaphor: H.A.M. it up in Teaching, Garner, 2003) Humor activates attention and increases memory retention. That's why I injected plenty of funny into my curriculum. How else do you explain learning about adverbs from two maggots living inside a dead cat?

My book Virtual Fred was an alternate selection of the Children's Book of the Month Club. My novel Die Laughing was listed as one of the best books of the year in Books for the Teen Age 95.

BS Telecommunications, Education Minor.

My main goal is to make writing class fun for kids so they want to learn and that is why I use storytelling as my main avenue of instruction. Kids love it and it works.