Creative writing ideas for the classroom
Creative writing is vital to develop children’s imaginations and writing skills. It is a way for children to express themselves and let their imaginations run wild. It is meant to be an enjoyable activity where children can dictate everything within it, no rules to stop them.
However, creative writing can feel like a chore to some pupils, and some may struggle with it due to learning disabilities or confidence issues. It is important for teachers to instil creative writing into their lessons. Guide children throughout the process and assure them that there can never be a wrong or rubbish story. This will make them feel more comfortable and at ease with creative writing sessions.
To help teachers with creative writing sessions, we have created a few creative writing ideas that are perfect for the classroom. We also delve into the purpose of creative writing and how to implement it into lessons to further assist you.
What is the purpose of creative writing for children?
The main purpose of creative writing for children is for them to have a space where they can express themselves freely and write about anything they want. It includes emotions to create a vivid image in the reader’s mind and these can mirror emotions felt by children.
However, creative writing has many purposes and benefits for children. A huge one is that it can help to improve grades in many different subjects due to improving thinking skills. Creative writing is great for learning as it’s not only about using creative words. It can improve how the brain works in learning new things. Creative writing enhances problem solving skills as pupils need to have a starting point that sets up a problem and they must think of a solution.
Plus, creative writing explores the world in an imaginative way and gives different perspectives on ongoing issues children face today. Through this, pupils learn more about themselves and the people around them.
How to implement creative writing in the classroom
There are many ways that teachers can implement creative writing in the classroom besides activities. These are needed to make creative writing sessions work and to be able to put activities in place.
Create times for creative writing in class
This is a vital part of planning creative writing in your lessons. Think about what you want to cover every day of the week and where you can slot creative writing. Creative writing needs to have plenty of time, around 1 hour of class time so think about how to logically fit that into your lesson plans. Also, schedule how often in the week you can do creative writing. Try to have sessions three times a week, at the beginning, middle and end of the week if possible.
Allow mistakes
The goal of creative writing is to increase fluency and writing skills making writing fun. Save any English mistakes such as grammar or spelling for those lessons. However, if there are mistakes rather than asking pupils to fix it, guide them on what is wrong and help rectify the mistakes. Don’t tell them off or make a big fuss, stay calm and collected otherwise they will worry about making mistakes in the future rather than enjoying the creative writing process.
Talk it through line by line
If a pupil struggles with organising sentences and story structure, sit with them and get them to read what they have so far out loud. Write it down line by line whilst they read and then rearrange it with them and discuss this with them.
Model creative writing by writing some out yourself to help them further with the organisation. This will help children learn from you and see that creative writing is important as well as enjoyable.
Use story structures
Discuss and run through some story structures to help pupils understand how to write creatively. The three-act structure is the most popular and useful to introduce to children who are building their writing skills. The first stage of this structure is to set the scene with an initial incident that brings the story to a climax. The second stage is a series of events that challenge. Obstacles appear in the way of the challenges and the writer must show the reactions to these obstacles. The third stage is the build-up of pressure bringing the story to the ultimate climax. Then the resolution to the obstacles is laid out tying up any loose ends.
This structure helps children to grasp the concept of how a story is told so that they can effectively do it themselves.
Creative writing activities for the classroom:
When the planning and basics have been covered for creative writing sessions, teachers must start to think about activities they can do to entice children to write. There is a vast array of activities to engage children in creative writing. We have created some fun writing activities for teachers to try out with their classes.
Write classic stories from a different perspective-
Firstly, read reimagined books to give children ideas on what they can do to twist classic stories. Read books such as revolting rhymes by Roald Dahl or The true story of the three little pigs by Jon Scieszka.
Ask children to think about a story they know very well or use these traditional tale puppets and let them pick a set to write about. Let them reimagine the story from a different perspective. This can be from a different character’s point of view, or they could even make up a character to write a perspective from.
Examples of this activity using the puppets, could be:
- Aladdin from Jasmines POV.
- Jack and the Beanstalk from the Giants POV.
- Peter Pan from Tinkerbells POV.
Missing pupil-
This activity is perfect to use for older pupils who can handle the situation and understand that it is a scenario. Start by asking where someone is and make up a name for them. The class may be confused by this at first as they know there isn’t someone called that in their class. However, they will eventually partake in the activity and realise it’s not real. Stick with it through the confusion and point to where the person usually sits in the classroom. Tell pupils to tell you where they are and why they aren’t in school. Keep on asking as someone will eventually make up where they are and why they aren’t in class.
When someone responds, argue back with “that’s not what I heard” and then proceed to ask the rest of the class where they are and why they aren’t in school. Soon the ball will start rolling as children will start to make up other excuses and imagine what this made-up person is doing. Their own stories will start to build, and pupils will also start seeing what this missing person looks like.
After this, introduce to them that this person is missing, and you need everyone to create a missing person poster. Tell them to describe who the person is as well as draw a picture of them. Ask them a range of questions like where were they last seen? Why aren’t they in class? What’s happening in their lives right now? From these questions, they will start to imagine a background for this person and before they know it they have developed a character and created a story.
Roll a story-
Using our roll a story dice allow children to create stories using what they have rolled. The dice have animals, food, places, transport, feelings, weather, actions, sports and objects on them. The outcomes of stories are limitless. Children can use all of these to create their story or choose what will work best from what they have rolled. They must use whatever they roll and then connect the random settings, characters and objects together to build a story.
With the randomness of the dice, children can create stories as wild and imaginative as they like, or they could opt to make sense of it by giving the story structure and fluency. To make this roll a story activity extra fun, put pupils in small groups where they can create one big story between them.
Create a dream recipe-
This creative writing activity uses children’s imagination and creativity to think and make up what dreams are made of. Get pupils to think about the BFG who captures dreams in jars and ask them what makes a dream. Then get them to create a recipe for dreams. Children should set out the ingredients as well as create a method to make dreams. They can also describe the type of dream they are making or make multiple dream recipes for happy and sad dreams as well as nightmares.
Have class mascots-
Use these animal puppets as class mascots for children to name together and imagine their backgrounds. This includes where they came from, their friends and family and their personality. Allow small groups of pupils to take one mascot home with them at a time. When the mascots have been taken home, children must write stories about what the mascot has done each day. They should include the mascot’s feelings about what they have done to improve their character development skills. These stories can be true or made up. Encourage children to be as creative as possible with the mascots.
When the mascots have returned, pupils take turns reading out their stories and discussing them with the class. Then choose your next group of pupils to pick mascots to take home and repeat until everyone has had an opportunity to take a mascot home.
Invent a place/type of animal-
Creative writing for children can be as simple and as fun as inventing something new. This could be a place, a type of animal, a new human race or even a new product. Let pupils decide what they want to invent and ask them to write down a description of it. Such as, what it looks like, where it lives/is, what it does, what’s its purpose, who engages with it etc.
Doing this activity will improve children’s descriptive writing skills which go hand in hand with creative writing. It will also help them to show and not tell which is a key factor in writing creatively. They will start to develop a sense of showing details to the reader instead of telling them what happens.
Write a story from a photo-
Hand out multiple photographs to pupils and ask them to choose the one they are most drawn to. Discuss with them why they have chosen that photo and what makes it stand out. Ask questions like what happened when the image was taken? What do you think happened before the image was taken? What do you think happened after the image was taken? Where are the people in the image? What do you think their lives are like? And what sort of people are they? Their personality, jobs, family & friends?
After asking these questions, ask pupils to write a short story based on what they have discussed about these images. They can connect their answers to the questions and create a whole scenario before the photo, during and after.
Use our feelings and emotions cards for the images and get children to do the activities on the back once they have completed their story. The cards also have similar questions that you can ask the class beforehand.
Create a storyboard-
Using sentence starter prompts, children can create a rough outline of a story. Give children five lots of five prompts and some dice. Let them roll the dice five times and whichever number it lands on they must pick the corresponding prompt. For example, if a child first rolls a 3, they must pick the third sentence starter along. If a child rolls a 4 on their second go, they choose the fourth one along and so forth. Once they have five sentence starters, let them think of what the sentence can be and allow them time to make each sentence make sense. This helps them to think about sentences and order them so that they flow.
Once this is done ask them to create their story on a storyboard, drawing out each sentence and writing the sentence underneath. Until they have a complete storyboard outline. Storyboards only outline what happens in a visual way with a simple explanation underneath, so it doesn’t have to be the complete story. From the storyboard, children can flesh the story out and complete it if they wish.
Creative writing is important to build children’s key English skills as well as improve many other key skills that are transferrable across the curriculum. It is crucial to fit creative writing into your lesson planning for the week. Use these fun activities and build children’s confidence through the power of writing. Use this story writing box for extra material and advice to implement creative writing in the classroom.
Remember that creative writing doesn’t have to be just writing a story out, it can be any fun writing activity that uses children’s imaginations.
For more assistance with introducing ideas and prompts for children to start writing creatively, check out our ‘32 good story starters’ blog.
