Teach Creative Writing
to Children
Creative writing involves more than putting words together to form sentences. A good writer carefully selects words, plans the storyline, develops strong characters and revises and edits his or her work. Teach creative writing with the use of the Six Traits, peer conferences, prompts, mini-lessons and graphic organizers.
Instructions
Teach Creative Writing to Children
1. Start with the Six Traits of Writing: Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency and Conventions. These six traits provide a way to assess students' writing. When students understand the traits, they know what is expected of their writing. Using and teaching the traits gives you a way to provide specific feedback about each student's skills and needs. Go to http://www.thetraits.org/scoring_guides.php to print out rubrics with detailed feedback for each trait. Use the rubrics to score student's work.
2. Begin each class with an engaging prompt. These prompts could be used for short stories, journaling or oral stories. Vary the types of prompts. You could use famous quotes, paintings, photographs, comic strips, passages from novels, poems, story starters or anything else students might relate to. Visit http://www.creativewritingprompts.com/# to view more than 300 prompts to get students started writing.
3. Teach students hold peer conferences with each other. During these evaluations, students read each other's writing and give feedback. Model or script an effective, valuable conference for the class to see. Vary how the partners or groups are organized; choose a friend, teacher's choice, student to the left, etc. Give students a sheet of questions to ask each other and turn in for a grade or credit. Questions could include: What is your favorite part of this story? Is there anything that is confusing to you, if so what? Go to http://oregonstate.edu/~petersp/ORST/WR121_files/course%20resources.htm#grading%20and%20peer%20review to learn more about peer evaluation and download examples of student work.
4. Demonstrate do a story or character graphic organizer. Students use these to plan out their ideas, characters, plot, main idea and direction of the story before writing. These graphic organizers take brainstorming a step further. They begin to take their ideas and develop them. Go to http://www.educationoasis.com/curriculum/GO/character_story.htm to download graphic organizer templates.
5. Show students how valuable the writing process is by giving multiple opportunities to edit and revise their work. According to Alice L. Trupe, author of "Revising Practices," "As he [the student] internalizes the feedback, he becomes a better critic of his own writing and progressively incorporates those critical insights into his own drafting and revising processes when writing outside of the classroom."
6. Teach mini-lessons at the beginning of each lesson. Focus the lessons on a small topic like using adjectives to replace the word "good." Teach other mini-lessons about strong verbs, fragments and run-on sentences, figurative language and good leads and conclusions. Go to http://www.jmeacham.com/writers.workshop/writing.mini.lessons.htm to see primary grade mini-lessons.
