Excalibur Magazine

Excalibur Magazine was the culmination of the work Luke did while using the Cover Story Writing curriculum. One of the intial assignments was to select a theme for the magazine. Luke chose the Medieval time period, as he was studying the Middle Ages in history and literature that year. Each assignment he wrote during the school year was included in the magazine. The types of writing assigments consisted of poetry, a letter to the editor, a letter to the reader, a restaurant review, an historical report, and finally, a short story. Incidentally, "Arturo and the Silk Road" began as a short story assignment during the school year that he later expanded over the summer.

Although the course does not require that the students format the work into a physical magazine, we just couldn't resist the opportunity. Using Pages, the Apple word-processing application, we started with one of the brochure templates and dragged and dropped his writing into the document. Since we were using this magazine for educational and personal purposes, we were able to use images from the internet as long as we cited the sources under each image. The formating was definitely a collaborative effort between Luke and me, while the advertisements became a full-on family affair. We laughed our way through the design of ads that make reference to each of his four grandparents (lots of inside, family jokes). We printed several copies of the magazine at www.magcloud.com and gave the publication to family and friends.

We hope you enjoy reading Excalibur Magazine and see it as an example of how the Cover Story Curriculum can come together into a final product that you will treasure as a keepsake.