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."

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...

I’m sure you all have at least some kind of experience with dictations in the classroom. Most of the time, dictations are considered boring and can get really frustrating for students, especially if they are still learning how to write in their L1. Here is an idea for practicing dictations and making them less painful. Running dictation is a type of dictation in which your students are responsible for it from the start.   They should work in pairs and it goes like this: You should come up with a story that you will write on a piece of paper and hang it onto the wall in your classroom. You can use multiple sheets of paper so that your students don’t collide during the activity. One person from the pair has to "run" to the paper and read and remember as much as possible and come back to their partner as fast as possible and dictate what they have read, while that person writes down the story. In the middle of the “game” you should tell them to swap the roles, so that ...