Workshop Creative writing - Teacher of the year 2016-2 tour regional

Workshop

Creative group writing

Aims:

      To show activities in developing writing skills

      To aware the participants about the importance of creative writing

Good afternoon dear participants and the honorable jury. As you know writing skills are very important and an integral part of learning English.

 Today I want to represent you some writing technologies to develop students’ creative writing, to motivate them to write, to widen and uncover their inner world, potential and creativity.

Creative writing is one of the most important skills a child can learn. The purpose of creative writing is both entertain and share students or peoples’ experience. The necessity of creative writing is:

     to entertain

     to foster artistic expression

     to explore the functions and values of writing

     to stimulate imagination

     to clarify thinking

     to search for identity

     to learn to read and write

Creative writing is written to entertain or educate someone, to spread awareness about something or someone, or to simply express one’s thoughts.

So the 1^st our task is. Look at the blackboard. What can you see? A letter, but you are going to write a letter unusually today. 

I.                  This activity would follow input work on writing in a particular style - for example, an informal letter inviting a friend to visit your home town for a holiday.

Preparation

Set up the context for the letter, you might do a letter layout on the board to make sure that everyone knows how to lay out an informal letter.

Procedure

Put the students in pairs or threes.

You‘ve got a large piece of paper and say, 'Right, everyone, I want you to write your address, write the opening greeting and then stop. And you do it immediately and you do it straight onto the paper.

 'OK now you're going to write the letter. But as you write it, at some point you'll hear me say 'Freeze!' and when I say 'Freeze!', I mean 'Freeze', even if you're in the middle of a word - you stop writing. If you're in the middle of a sentence you stop writing.'

The students begin to write. I check that everyone has written something before I say 'Freeze!' for the first time. I try to hurry the ones along that are lagging behind a little.

When I say 'Freeze!', I transfer each paper to the next group so that everyone's working with another piece of paper with a letter on it. I give the following instruction which is to read, correct, improve and continue. So, they work on the letter that they've received and then they continue that letter.

A bit later I say 'Freeze!' and off we go again. Transfer letters, read, correct, improve and continue.

It's always good to get the paper back to the original group just before the ending and again the same instruction - read, correct and improve and this time you say 'close'. So they bring it to a finale.

Put on the blackboard letters

II.               The main focus of the next  activity is on developing writing skills, but it's also good for developing listening speaking and reading skills and also for practicing past tenses, descriptive vocabulary and generally having fun.

The activity should work at most levels above elementary, as long as your students have some knowledge of past tenses, but it works best when they also know past continuous / progressive too. All you need to get things started is a sheet of plain paper for each pair of students.

The listening part comes first:

• Draw  the face of a person in the top right-hand corner of the page.

• Give  the person a name.

• Then on the top left of the page write five adjectives to describe the person's appearance.

• Next write five more adjectives to describe the person's character.

• Write three things that the person likes doing.

• Write  who the person lives with.

• YOU have built up a character profile for the person you are going to write about.

The writing part:

• Teacher dictates

 'It was a dark and stormy night and'.

 write in the name of the person you have drawn and followed by the word 'was'.

• Then wake up your imagination and complete the sentence
• Add  one more sentence.

After students have done the instructions

·         Stop  and pass the paper to the pair on their right (this means that every pair of students now has a new character).

• Students read through the information and the beginning of the story and then add one more sentence to it.
• Once they've done this   pass the paper to the next pair on their right.

Continue to do this with each pair of students adding a sentence to each story, gradually building up each story as the papers are passed around the class.

• Finish your story

Follow up:

·         Teachers puts the stories up around the class and gets the students to read them all and decide which is best.

• Give each pair of students a story and get them to try to find and correct errors.

• Get the students to write the stories up on a computer and then ask them to add more description and details to the stories.

• This activity is fun and creative and has always worked well for me both with adults and younger students.

III.           This activity really makes writing in class fun. I have used this activity for some years and it has always been a hit. It's good practice for writing creative stories using narrative tenses.

I have used this activity with children from pre-intermediate level and up. At the end of this activity, students usually get a funny story written by at least 7 students or pairs of students from their class.

Preparation

• Make copies of the fold-over worksheet or a blank page.
• Prepare questions for the story (see procedure below).

Procedure

• YOU  are going to write a story together. They can write in pairs or individually.
• Give out the worksheet or a blank page. Make sure the students write their names on the top of the worksheet.
• THE Story  is going to be about alien and ask them a question. They have to write their answer on the worksheet. The questions should be who/what/when/where/how questions.
• I usually use this activity when I cover the topic of aliens with a class, but you can use this activity for most topics. I tell the students that they have seen an alien and they are going to write a story about what happened. Then I read out (or if necessary write on the board) the first question:

When did you see the alien and where were you?

• After the students have completed the answer for the first question they fold the worksheet over so that their answer cannot be seen and then they pass it to the student/s on their right. Then ask the second question and the procedure is repeated with the remaining questions. Here are the rest of the questions I usually ask:

Who were you with?

What were you doing?

What did the alien look like?

What did you do when you saw the alien?

What happened in the end?

How was it?

• Don’t  read what the previous student/s have written. This makes the end result even more amusing.
• When the students have completed all the questions tell them to open out the worksheet and pass it to the person whose name is written on top.
• Tell the students to read their stories. Usually they get a few laughs!
• Ask a few students to read their stories to the class

Alternatives

This activity can be used for many other topics. Here are another few examples:

Meeting someone famous

1. What famous person did you meet?
2. Where did you meet them and who were you with?
3. What was the famous person wearing and how did he/she look (e.g. glamorous/ taller than I thought/ not too beautiful)?
4. What was he/she like? (e.g. friendly/ funny/ annoyed)
5. What did you do when you saw the famous person?
6. What happened next? ( e.g. He/she signed an autograph/walked away)

A great holiday

1. Where and when did you go?
2. Who did you go with?
3. Describe the place you went to.
4. What did you do there? (e.g. snowboarding, trekking, swimming, climbed Mt. Everest)
5. What sights did you see? ( e.g. The Eiffel tower, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China)
6. What was the weather like?
7. Did you have a good time?

Error correction

If you would like to correct some of the students writing errors take note of the most common errors and write their sentences (or change the sentence so that the student can't be identified) on the board for the students to correct. Alternatively, you could make a worksheet for the next class to correct these errors.