Here’s a fun activity for teaching creative writing at any grade level. It aligns particularly well with folktale units (folktales, sharing stories, storytelling) but can be adapted to other units as well. Special thanks to Susan Obuchi for submitting this idea.
I have students draw a picture of themselves sleeping with their head on a pillow. They then take a piece of construction paper and fold it over like a blanket under their chin. You then staple this to the picture so that it shows them in bed with blanket on.
On the inside of the blanket students write about a dream that they have had. By having students write about dreams their is very little pressure to come up with an original idea since you don’t get to choose your dreams. This also makes for an attractive bulletin board display.
Be sure to ask students to visualize their dream, paying attention to sights, sounds, smells, and the feeling they had while dreaming.
Mathew,
I absolutely love your idea. thank you so much for sharing it. I intend on using it with my grade nine students and sharing it with other teachers.
I have an activity some what similar where I get the kids to draw a picture on a topic at the top of a page and t and them below write something about the topic. I ask the class to generate some topic ideas to help kids get over the bump of having to come up with a topic on their own. This activity works well too. I tell my students that they can draw using stick figure and I put an example on the board to show them what a terrible artist I am,but that it doesn’t matter.
I’m glad that this will work well even in the ninth grade.
You might be shocked that sometimes even second grade teachers don’t want to incorporate drawing in the writing process. Even though drawing takes time, whenever I employ it in the classroom, the quality of writing is so much better. Thank you for validating that it has value even in the ninth grade.
To be fair, I did not come up with this idea. It was shared with me by Susan Obuchi and she doesn’t remember where she saw it.
I’m not shocked that even grade two teachers are reluctant to use drawing in the writing process. I’m not sure why. It could be something to do with the teachers own learning style. I’m a strong visual and tactile learner so I like using pictures.
Don’t know about fetting student to write about dreams, as I have already started my, and found out it’s really hard to remember what you dreamed about.
Second grade students can remember their dreams. They also can add their imagination to it; no one knows if it’s an accurate representation of their dream except for them.
I used this near Halloween and had the children write about a Bad dream. they love it because it was their own scary story :0)