Brittany Said:

How to teach creative writing?

We Answered:

get the children to read read read read read make sure what they read is interesting, and of a high quality,
pick interesting fantasy or fictional stories and read them with vigour

creative writing is 99% inspiration and 1% convention
the conventions are important but when the children are involved and passionate then they will be most interested in going through the editing and self-correction process which is how they will best learn convention

talk them through the process of beggining a story, give them perhaps a few beggings, some could be time oriented- long ago... once upon a time... three years ago... etc.

find inspiring ideas for them to base their stories on
use materials, photographs, objects, guided visualisation, fantasy settings, interesting science fiction ideas, whatever you can dream up to help inspire them

perhaps you could tie it in with the sport they are doing, or the social studies area they are learning about


an interesting beggining would be for the children to watch a little bit of the surfing movie- biggest wednesday, (50ft plus face waves) where the surfers towed in by jet-ski and the helicopters watching were dwarfed by the waves -
and to get them to write from there

as soon as the children have the idea of making stories up-(which most will) they will be able to have far more freedom

a great exercise is to ask the children to give you a list of the ten top words they would use in a story, and then tell them they have to write a story without using these words
some will struggle, others will relish the challenge, with support all will learn and develop

(if the children struggle with handwriting you may need to set minumum legth requirement and convention guidlines before- hand, as they may write a few sentences and tell you they have finished, these will be useless if the children are not inspired and they will come up with all sorts of strategies to avoid them, however if you can really inspire them these will be easy to help them to achieve.)

once they have dived in, then it is time to start talking about grammer and paragraphing and sentencing or whatever level they are at

if you can build passion with the entire class about this activity
they are already successful and your job will be easy