Dear Fellow Parents,
June Writers Academy was born from the desire of a group of parents to give children access to a comprehensive, rigorous, and joyful home-based writing and critical thinking curriculum. We wanted to teach humanities at the level that many kids are ready to access, but too often is not available in classrooms. This sort of deep problem-solving enrichment program is now easily found in math and other STEM fields for kids but has been notably absent when it comes to writing, critical thinking, and other humanities disciplines.
We set out to change that. June Writers Academy is the result of years of experience testing and refining curricula and techniques that grab kids’ attention and mold them into writers, readers, and deep thinkers. We put kids at the center, and we also recognized the need to support parents directly as well, because it’s parents who kids turn to at the end of the day to guide them through their roadblocks and questions. Our goal was to become the go-to resource for parents who don’t want to cross their fingers and hope for the best at school, cobble together their own curriculum, rely on dull workbooks or quiz apps that lack depth, or pay for expensive tutors or classes. Instead, we set out to build what we wished we had access to raising our own exceptionally bright children.
We hope you’ll join us.
Sincerely,
The June Writers Academy Team
The June Writers Academy philosophy.
The power of writing.
Whether your child grows up to become an engineer or a poet, they will be clearer, more powerful, and more nuanced thinkers if they are taught to invest in their writing early and often. Writing is our brain and hearts made visible, and writing well and often teaches us to refine our thought processes. Our children are growing up in a world where critical thinking will shape their success—on this planet and in a work environment where AI will play an ever-larger role in technical tasks. Will your child be ready?
Kids are highly capable.
We have seen time and again that kids are capable of hard things and beautiful writing if given the opportunity and support to try. Our kids need to learn the conventions of grammar and writing mechanics, from commas and verb-subject agreement to how to spell and decode Greek & Latin roots. But that should just be the starting point. Kids do better when they understand the reasoning and history behind writing conventions: Why do we use commas? Who invented them and why? What does that tell you about how to approach ambiguous writing situations?
Similarly, we strongly believe that kids need to learn to build and use complex arguments as the foundation of their writing. Too often, children are taught to write template-based essays that are essentially simple bullet-point lists strung together with connecting phrases. These essays are mechanically sound but don’t engage the full potential of our children’s ability to think deeply and critically. June Writers Academy teaches kids how to ground even their earliest paragraphs in rigorous thought, appropriate to their age. We also teach kids to be flexible writers who can work beyond templates. We show them how to adapt their writing to suit any given situation, from school to far beyond, because their future won’t look like today’s world.
Words are fun.
We passionately believe that words are just a whole lot of fun and that ideas can upend worlds. June Writers brings that authentic love of words to all parts of our program. Our goal is to infect your child with the same life-long love.
Special Thanks
We want to extend a special thanks to all the young people who have agreed to let us use their writing and artwork, particularly Junius D, who created and/or consulted on much of our original art.
Kit Hodge, Founder & Director
Kit has spent two decades of her professional career as an entrepreneur and advocate wielding words to change the world for the better. She’s the mother of two children who are growing into powerful writers and thinkers thanks to June Writers Academy, and is thrilled to share this joy with even more families. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and did additional graduate-level work at Columbia University and NYU.