About Us

Splatter! is a Yale community service organization that aims to encourage creative expression in New Haven area middle school students by leading writing and illustration workshops and publishing a magazine of the students' work. Each workshop team of three or four volunteers visits a classroom at least three times a semester to engage the class in poetry, short story, and drawing activities. Writing activities range from pass-around poems and stories to metaphor poems to prose pieces written about a person who has significantly influenced the student in some way. After the class writes for about twenty minutes and volunteers encourage individuals with their ideas and efforts, students share their pieces with the class. During the last workshop of a semester, students illustrate compositions written by students from other schools, an activity at which new students may excel. The illustrator reflects on the piece of a student from another school, allowing pupils from different schools to interact through writing.

Splatter! volunteers choose a selection of the students' writing and illustration pieces to be published in a magazine designed at the end of every semester. Recognition helps middle school students gain confidence in their own abilities, especially since students who are awesome creative writers or artists may not be acclaimed for their schoolwork. Students also have an opportunity to meet older peers who have a true interest in them.

At the end of each semester, the volunteers compile a magazine of selected works to be distributed to all the schools that participated, the public library, and the Yale College community. By reading the magazine, students can learn from the work of other participants who are often very culturally different from themselves; pieces written by students in ESL classrooms, sometimes in a foreign language, are frequently included in Splatter!. Overall, Splatter! rewards both the volunteers and the students by allowing undergraduates to meet New Haven students in an educational setting, by creating an atmosphere in which older students encourage younger pupils in their endeavors, and by uniting children of different backgrounds and experiences through writing.

Our Goals

• To show kids that their own life is worthy subject for writing.
• To introduce kids to creative writing as a medium for sharing and communicating by encouraging them to read their work aloud at the end of the workshops.
• To give kids the excitement and gratification of seeing their work in print, either in the magazine or on a school bulletin board.
• To develop an appreciation for literature in kids.
• To encourage kids to read and keep a journal.
• To tie in writing with what the kids have been studying in school.
• To have fun with kids while exposing them to creative writing!

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