STEAM Writing deepens whatever students are studying in science, to help find connections between science and English language arts and strengthen their writing skills across the curriculum. Choose from ecosystems, landforms, animal adaptations, the water cycle, chemistry, biology and physics—or invent your own workshop or residency with Mimi.

Transform yourself into an endangered animal, to examine your life in your habitat, understand why you need your adaptations and invent new ones. Then share your newfound wisdom - and your requests for others to respect your habitat -  through your own poetry and visual art.

Which standards do you hate to teach? You know, the ones your students just don’t understand, no matter how many times you try to teach them? In this workshop, we’ll find fun, new and improved ways to play with your most frustrating standards. The activities you'll learn work equally well in person and in the virtual classroom.

Can you smell your grandmother’s chocolate chip cookies baking? Dive into a cool, blue swimming pool on a steamy August day? Read between the lines of literature? Mimi Herman leads students to writing and makes them think. Everyone’s a poet in this accessible, hands-on and delightful poetry experience.

Arrive at Ellis Island  in 1901 with only a steamer trunk and your hopes, and discover how to live in a new country without leaving your own culture behind. As we immigrate, we will integrate, weaving writing and drama seamlessly with social studies to bring history to life and understand the complex process of becoming an American.

Read art to discover its secret language - and translate your discoveries into creative writing. Here’s your chance to become best friends with a piece of art. Listen to its secrets, draw or paint it and find the poems within.

From free verse to sonnets, from self-expression to science, social studies or literature – Mimi engages students in understanding themselves, the curriculum and the world through reading and writing poetry.

Got Intelligence? In this workshop, you’ll try on a variety of ways to be smart. We’ll build our brains from materials at hand and explore the Intelligences within us with a Multiple Intelligences Treasure Hunt.

This workshop is for everyone, from those who wake up with a poem on your lips to those who can't string two sentences together with a needle and thread. From Play-Doh to Plato, from Vick’s VapoRub to vectors, from soap bubbles to surface tension, you’ll integrate writing with your five senses throughout your life - and throughout the curriculum.  

Mapping Your Life

When you explore your life (or the lives of characters or historical figures) through map-making, experiences becomes highways, friends become continents and challenges become ocean. Especially effective in ESL, ELA, Social Studies and Visual Arts.

Connect with Your Community - For Libraries, Museums & Cultural Institutions

Hands-on professional development for libraries, museums and cultural institutions will help you reach your community and rediscover the joy in your work. Kennedy Center teaching artist Mimi Herman, a writer with a passion for books, the arts, history, and science, will engage you in lively online and take-away experiences and collaboration across disciplines to ease the social and emotional stresses we’re all experiencing.