How Do You Teach Creative Writing To Children?
Creative writing involves more than putting words together to form sentences. A good writer carefully selects words, plans the storyline, develops strong characters and revises and edits his or her work. Teach creative writing with the use of the Six Traits, peer conferences, prompts, mini-lessons and graphic organizers. Start with the Six Traits of Writing: Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency and Conventions. These six traits provide a way to assess students’ writing. When students understand the traits, they know what is expected of their writing. Using and teaching the traits gives you a way to provide specific feedback about each student’s skills and needs. Go to http://www.thetraits.org/scoring_guides.php to print out rubrics with detailed feedback for each trait. Use the rubrics to score student’s work. Begin each class with an engaging prompt. These prompts could be used for short stories, journaling or oral stories. Vary the types of prompts. You could use
