Teacher Discussion Forums

How can we motivate level 5 students to write narratives of their own? We mean, short stories...

Through the popular and engaging medium of comic books.

Right here:

http://www.grammarmancomic.com/wquestmenu.html

My own students have produced some amazing work using this project. Much better than I'd hoped - and they really seem to be enjoying it.

Brian

There's one more site that I think's great for teaching creative writing:
http://www.ttms.org/

I'm sure between these two sites, you'll have no difficulties coming up with material...

James

P.S. Some of the PDFs are quite big, so its worth using the "Save Target As" (right click and its on the pop-up menu in IE), so that you can keep them on your PC easily....

ana veiga wrote:How can we motivate level 5 students to write narratives of their own? We mean, short stories...

I've found "Forced writing" to be helpful. Set an amount of time, and the kids MUST WRITE for that entire time. Start them at 5 minutes. 15 minutes is a realistic max for sustained writing without stopping.

If the student can't think of anything to write, she should just write anything, even if it's just "I don't know what to write. I don't know what to write. I don't know what to write." After a while just the habit breaks them out of their ruts and they start writing and you'd be amazed at what they can do.

Then in subsequent lessons we learn to do re-writes

ALTERNATIVE: Make Picture Cards. These are just pictures (I like half-page or larger.) cut from magazines. I paste them on plain white paper and laminate them. Deal each student three to five picture cards and give them one minute to choose which card to use as an inspiration for the story.

I like to scan and print the picture and let the student mount it with a final clean copy of the story.

There's another name for that technique, "Speed Writing"... Write as much as you can as fast you can! (It just sounds a bit more exciting)

What I tend to do to build them up to that, is to give them an opportunity to write whatever thoughts come in to their head. They don't have to write in sentences and I tend to give them completely blank paper. It's very good as a first step to creative writing.

I don't know if this will help much, but I just uploaded a storywriting presentation onto my Website at: http://www.jamesabela.co.uk/intermediate/
(Its at the bottom called, stories)

I also forgot to mention that there's a nice section on Bogglesworld:
http://bogglesworldesl.com/creativewriting.htm (New address)

James
http://www.jamesabela.co.uk/