Description
Prompting your students to write can be extremely challenging. Writing requires organizing thoughts, and presenting them clearly, which requires time, and focus. Because of this, students often find it hard and prefer less demanding tasks.
And yet, writing skills are among the most basic and fundamental objectives of school education. How hard it is to push your students on this steep path?
This course will help participants train their writing skills in their classroom with creative assignments that are designed to promote motivation and fun. It will constantly ask participants to engage in writing.
Experimenting with the activities on themselves, participants will acknowledge their effectiveness, and feel more confident in proposing them in their school setting.
Participants will discover novel activities, games, and techniques to introduce their learners to (creative) writing. They will identify many ways to exercise student imagination and engage the five senses in writing. They will explore how to describe multiple perspectives and discuss how to shape new characters and locations or structure the plot of a story.
Participants will also learn to make writing more personal by expressing their emotions, feelings, and expectations through it – that is, another effective means to raise student interest in writing. Finally, they will practice with prose as well as poetry, which constitute a different powerful setting where to prompt student imagination and improve writing skills.
All the activities proposed are equally effective for writing in one’s own language as well as in a second language. Thus, the course will support school teachers in promoting student writing in the mother language as well as in a foreign language.
By the end of the course, participants will be able to convey to students the importance of creative writing. They will be able to increase students’ awareness, confidence, and fluency in writing, and to use writing tasks to improve students’ understanding of language as a live medium that allows them to manipulate and express personal meanings.
Learning outcomes
The course will help the participants to:
- Improve learners’ confidence and fluency in writing;
- Use a variety of activities, games, and techniques to encourage students’ creative writing;
- Guide students in the creation of a story (characters, places, and plot);
- Support language development at all levels (grammar, vocabulary, phonology, and speech);
- Increase student creativity and motivation in writing;
- Create a relaxed and playful atmosphere in the classroom;
- Support student emotional development;
- Propose stimulating and fun tasks to make writing (in either L1 or L2) more attractive.
Tentative schedule
Day 1 – Introduction to the course and creative writing
- Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities;
- Icebreaker activities.
Creative writing makes students motivated
- The hard problem of motivation;
- Creative Writing: a valuable tool for increasing student engagement and fun;
- Writing to promote personal development and growth.
Day 2 – Expressing creativity and imagination in writing
- Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style” and opportunities for a creative mind;
- Creating personal avatars and inventing places in the Global Simulation Game (GSG);
- Presentations of the participants’ schools.
Day 3 – Let’s get to the heart of creativity!
- Playing and creating with a second language;
- Techniques to practice writing creatively: the five senses, chained words, meet an emotion, transform a defect into a value.
Day 4 – Develop a story
- Plot, characters, and description of the places;
- Activity: write and present parts of a story, a prologue, or a first chapter.
Day 5 – Can you learn a language through poetry?
- Introduction on poetry and its resources to improve in the target language;
- Activity Found Poetry: create a poem entirely from words and phrases taken from (found in) another textual source;
- Acrostic Game: write a verse playing with a word.
Day 6 – Course closure and cultural activities
- Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussion;
- Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance;
- Excursion and other external cultural activities.