Creative Teacherette

This post is another one in the "section" of creative writing. As I have already said, it can be pretty difficult to get your students to write their own stories, so these methods can be of great help.  Mini saga is a story of exactly 50 words, that your students have to write. It can also have a title of up to 15 words, but the title can also be omitted. It is great to stimulate creativity and determine the crucial elements of a story. Here's an example of a mini saga by Daniel H. Pink: "When I was shot, fear seized me at first. No surprise that. But once I realized I wasn’t going to die – despite the thermonuclear pain and widening puddle of weirdly warm blood – my mind recalibrated. And one thought, comforting yet disturbing, leapt into my head: I need to tweet this."

Remember my blog post about creative writing activities , where your students have to connect the titles of their favorite songs into a story? Well, besides their favorite song titles you can use visual statements, which can be found everywhere on the internet.  Some of my favorite web - sites for this are: http://weheartit.com/ http://www.visualstatements.net/ http://pinterest.com/fashark/visual-statements/ http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/visual%20statement http://www.someecards.com/ You can also use these to teach your students how English language functions in terms of irony and sarcasm ( someecards ) . If they are longer you can tell them to write a story about what a visual statement is saying. Or you can make a bigger project where your students write their impressions about learning English on a poster and incorporate some visual statements in their stories, so you end up with a "picture story" of some sort. Another idea is to use vi...

A b io-poem is a poem that describes a person in 11 lines. It is also a great method for inspiring your students to write poems or anything actually. This is what a bio-poem should look like: (First name)- (Four adjectives that describe the person) Son or Daughter of (your parents names) Lover of (three different things that the person loves) Who feels (three different feelings and when or where they are felt) Who gives (three different things the person gives) Who fears (three different fears the person has) Who would like to see (three different things the person would like to see) Who lives (a brief description of where the person lives) -(last name)      Another example can be found here .   How do you inspire your students to write? Have you ever used a bio-poem? ...

I’m not really a good writer, especially when it comes to creative writing, so it’s no surprise that I hated the lessons in which we had to come up with and write a story or something similar. Free writing is a method that can help your students deal with similar feelings and practice creative writing.  Students are asked to write about something for 5 minutes without break, without thinking about the process, no grammar awareness is needed and it is not graded. They choose whether they are ready to share the written with the others after the 5 minutes have passed.  So the rules are: you continue your writing before the time is up you do not evaluate the quality of the text itself, but just the ideas you ignore the spelling rules after 5 minutes give them one more minute to finish, because good ideas come under pressure At first it might be difficult to write about anything, so you could give them a topic, as simple as “a c...