Before I taught my first class, I crafted the Creative Writing Handbook. I started by researching how other classes presented various topics of creative writing to older children, and the sequence in which they taught the topics. Though I am a writer, I had never taught someone else to write, so I researched teaching strategies as well. This allowed me to present the content of the handbook in a way that others would be able to understand. After my researching stage, I developed the activities. I knew that leading my class through the creative writing activities would take up the majority of the lesson time, so I wanted to spend adequate time developing these activity pages to my satisfaction.

There are story planning tools and techniques that are commonly used by many writers, so I looked to existing resources online that I updated to better suit my needs. Sometimes, I was unable to find existing resources similar to my vision, so in those cases, I developed original activities from scratch.

One thing I did well in my handbook was scaffolding. Scaffolding is a term used in education that is about adding and removing certain supports for students as their learning progresses. As students become more comfortable with a concept, educators can move away from direct support and more towards building upon students’ existing knowledge. 

At the beginning of the course, I taught story planning techniques as we worked on brainstorming, character design, and plot development. These classes were taught before students started writing their stories, and focused on broad, fundamental skills needed for creative writing. In the handbook, you can notice the gradual decrease of direct step-by-step instructions as the book progresses, and how the concepts of creative writing become narrower and more focused. Towards the end of the handbook, many of the pages are reference pages and do not include any steps to complete on the page itself, like the descriptive writing and dialogue pages. This is because as the course progressed, students began applying the writing techniques they learned in class directly into their stories.

Lesson 1

My first lesson was about brainstorming. By the end of the class, all my students had a story idea that they would work on throughout the four weeks. This lesson was like a funnel for ideas – students brainstormed a wide variety of things that could be included in their stories, separated these things into three different story ideas, and finally chose one story idea to develop further with a freewrite. The course started off strong, as this activity was a hit among my students. Just like how the handbook as a whole exhibited scaffolding, this single lesson showed scaffolding as well – on a smaller scale – with how students gradually built upon their previous work to produce a story idea.

Lesson 2

I taught two lessons a week for four weeks, totalling eight lessons. The next lesson in the first week was about protagonist development. In this class, I had to demonstrate an ability to cater content to different needs and audiences. Because of the age of my students, I chose to use the term “main character” instead of “protagonist,” revised my character description examples to be simpler, and chose questions for the character interview that I believed would be relevant to the age and interest of my class. Because I write regularly and have grown comfortable and experienced with creative writing, I had to consciously ensure my lessons, terms, and examples would meet my students where they were.

Lesson 3

The third lesson was about supporting characters and antagonists. The class’s activity had similar results as the one before – developed characters to add to the cast – but the lesson was about story conflict. The lesson on conflict in stories went along with the ideas of antagonist development, but weren’t completely correlated. Because of this disconnect between the lesson and activity, I had to have seamless transitions so students would see the connection between conflict and villains. I did this by linking some forms of conflict – such as Person vs. Self – with the protagonist lesson from the week before. With previous knowledge activated, I could talk about the remaining forms of conflict. The last form was Person vs. Person, which transitioned into the antagonist questionnaire. 

Lesson 4

Lesson four was about plot. At the beginning of all my lessons, I read an excerpt from a story. These excerpts were chosen from books that highlight the lesson’s topic. By showing these creative writing skills used artfully by an experienced author in my activators, I was able to remind my students of these examples throughout the rest of the lesson. Previously, these activators were quite short – only one to two paragraphs – but in this lesson I outlined all the rising action plot points of The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket. The lesson on breaking down a “plot rollercoaster” was also lengthy, and didn’t leave a lot of time for the activity. It started to resemble a lecture-style class, which was not the environment I was going for. Teaching this lesson taught me that I would need to simplify my content if it got to be so long.

Lesson 5

The fifth lesson was on setting and descriptive writing. This week marked the transition from story planning to writing. After my previous lesson on plot, I knew I wanted this lesson to have more student participation. I read the first two paragraphs from a book called Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie, which highlighted the setting and mood. After reading the excerpt, I lead a discussion about other things we could add to the setting to reinforce the mood, and what we would add to make the mood the exact opposite. The activity for this lesson also allowed students to explore setting. I curated six images, and each student chose one of these scenes to write about. This activity was excellent in allowing my students to have an individual voice, because they could write about how their chosen image made them feel, or what they thought this setting would be like to inhabit.

Lesson 6

In this class, we learned about dialogue and practiced writing a conversation between characters in the form of a comic strip. For my dialogue examples, I had images shared on my screen with speech bubbles corelated with the character speaking. This clearly showed the exact quote from the characters, and led into my lesson on how to format dialogue in a story. The speech bubbles worked well to reinforce concepts of dialogue, and was incorporated into the class’s activity. With blank comic strips printed in the handbook, students practised writing a conversation between two characters. By using things already familiar to the children – such as speech bubbles and comics – I was able to introduce new concepts.

Lesson 7

With the class concluding by the end of the week, I taught my students techniques to revise their stories, and how to choose an excerpt to send in to be printed in the class anthology. In my lesson, I introduced one acronym to help students as they revised their stories, and another acronym to help in choosing an excerpt. As the class went on, however, I became aware that these two acronyms were being mixed up. Teaching this lesson taught me that I should limit my lessons to only one topic, instead of trying to introduce multiple topics at once. Otherwise, I ran the risk of having two separate mini lessons mixed up or not fully grasped by students.

Lesson 8

The last class was to celebrate the hard work by students and to set up the class anthology, where students would be sharing their stories with one another. I had been hoping to highlight Indigenous perspectives, by sharing an oral story and talking about the significance of storytelling in Indiginous cultures. I knew most stories were typically shared in the winter months, but I contacted an Elder and asked if she had any stories that would be appropriate to share in the spring and summer season. She didn’t have any stories, but did send me some facts about storytelling, which also explained why this tradition is done only in the winter. I shared these facts with my students in place of the typical excerpt from a story. I needed to be flexible in what kinds of class activators I sought out, because it was important to me to include Indigenous narratives.