RBR Summer Slam Students Hone Writing Skills in Prep for HS

Diem Jones, the Executive Director of VON, (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) is also a poet, multi-media artist, musician and inductee into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame. He visited RBR to mentor and inspire students’ expression in art and writing.

He explained to the students, “The arts are precious to me. It is the bridge between people. And all art tells a story whether it is a poem, a song, or a picture.”

The students were then tasked to draw three images, the way they saw themselves today, their biggest challenge, and how they would portray themselves upon resolving that challenge. The students would then express these pictures in words utilizing the writer’s skills of storytelling including the who, what, when, where and why that every story contains.

Down the hall that same day, students were busy interviewing one another in a Project Write Now workshop. They learned about their interviewee’s greatest fears, obsessions, loves, most important achievement or treasured possession. Then, they fashioned these answers into a biographical essay to share with the entire class. It was a fun way to hone their skills of interviewing and writing while getting to know their future classmates.

Jennifer Chauhan conducted the workshop. She and her partner Allison Tevald, who founded the non-profit, were recently honored with the SOURCE Community Partnership Award for providing college essay writing and research paper support to RBR students over the past five years.

Summer Slam is the largest of a plethora of RBR summer school programs conducted during the summer. It is operated by the RBR SOURCE, whose mission is to remove all obstacles that impede a students’ academic success. Over 110 students from RBR’s three sending school districts of Red Bank, Little Silver and Shrewsbury attended the four-week summer program.