6 Creative Writing Tasks for Better, Understandable and Effective Writing

Topic: Techniques for writing tasks,
Skill Focused: Writing,
Grade: Primary and Lower Secondary. 
 
                          
                        Writing is one of the biggest challenges for teachers. Because children do not want to write. Especially in second language classrooms, teachers are facing big trouble in giving writing tasks.  When we ask students to write, often we are just testing their skills rather than teaching them how to write or how to improve their writing. So teachers need to encourage their learners by assigning interesting writing activities. 

                          So, here are my techniques to help learners dig deeper when they write. These six creative writing tasks help learners for better, understandable, and effective writing.  

1. Picture/ Scene Writing:
                  We know that students draw on their experience of reading when shaping their own writing. Usually, stories have different connected scenes. Some stories are illustrated and narrated through the scenes. So when we teach the story in a way, students are easily connected and able to retell the main events or sequence of the story. Here I taught a story in the way and then asked my students to summarize the story according to the scenes.  I have prepared the below worksheet based on the main idea of the story to make them recall the story easily

2. Character/Comic Writing:
                     As Stephen Cary, a second language learner specialist and author of Going Graphic: Comics at Work in the Multilingual Classroom, says: “Comics provide authentic language learning opportunities for all students. Comics provide narrative experiences for students just beginning to read and for students acquiring a new language. Images support the text and give students significant contextual clues to word meaning. Comics act as a scaffold to student understanding. So I use comics in my teaching to develop the reading and writing skills of my students. The diagrams help me to make my learners understand the concept well and write the story in their way.

3. Storyboard/Timeline Writing:
                        For students experiencing difficulty in this area, it is beneficial to break the elements of writing into small, specific steps, teach these steps systematically, and then provide opportunities for these steps to be practiced individually before combining them into a large piece of writing. So storyboard writing will help your learners to connect and memorize the events of a story or the content.

4. Character Plant:
                    Sometimes, stating clear rules and expectations is just not enough. It may not work for all your students. That’s why you should also take a “lighter” path. It means that you can use non-intrusive motivation techniques that will inspire your students instead of scaring them. Branching/Plant writing to describe the life events of great personalities/authors in an effective way. 

5. 4 Questions:
                       Prepare some questions related to a story, city, or an event and ask students to write answers to them. Such tasks can help them to concentrate or think about a specific aspect of the given topic. They also enable students to consolidate their understanding and to write complete paragraphs by joining their answers together.

6. Theme Writing:
               Effective writing is a necessity, not only for academic success but also for active participation in our society. Support students’ attempts by providing the necessary level of scaffolding until mastery of the strategy is achieved. So theme-based writing or bird's eye view writing is one of the good writing strategies for students to write about a story or an event. It involves students summarizing a story or an event that they have listened to or read. So for such tasks, prepare some puppets and ask students to write a brief summary of the story. The puppets or pictures help them to recall the story and theme more easily and can stimulate their creativity. 

              As a teacher, your role is to help each and every student improve themselves, acquire new skills, and become a better individual by the end of their time spent in school. These tasks will help us to create interest among learners and also develop writing skills. Slow learners also participate actively in writing tasks. Hope you enjoy the post. Thank you.   

Previous Post
« Prev Post
Next Post
Next Post »

Comments

Sachin said…
Thanks for sharing.

Popular posts from this blog

"Our Needs - Water" - Lesson plan and activities

"HEALTHY FOOD - Lesson plan, activities and downloadable worksheets to teach."

MY HOUSE SPEAKING ACTIVITY- CREATIVE TEACHING MODEL TO TEACH VOCABULARY