Making Writing Fun Again by Deb Day

I  learned something in the last few years of teaching Creative Writing. High school students didn’t think writing was fun. According to their writing autobiographies, writing in school was dull and lifeless and done only according to teacher directions. No voice. No choice. No fun.

Sometimes, I forgot that too.

One of the last years I taught, during conference week I tried some new writing activities. It was a great time to remind us all that writing is fun, creative and doable. I used these ideas with eighth graders through seniors and they could easily be adapted for other grade levels  I have to say, the eighth graders are waaayyyy more excited about writing stories than the high schoolers are.

One day we all wrote from picture prompts. Search “picture prompts” on Pinterest or Google. I always found some interesting ones to use. I tried to use pictures that looked like they had a story to tell and then I tried to match the pictures to students. Kids got done with this assignment and always said, "That was fun." 

The premise is simple. Students work in groups of three. They were given a picture with these directions:
WRITER #1: Tell the story about what was happening when this picture was taken
WRITER #2: Add to the first writer's story.
WRITER #3: Share your thoughts or the life lesson.
WRITER #1: Read the story. Edit and revise it for clarity. Give it a title.
The idea and the questions aren't mine (as soon as I find the originator again, I'll be sure to credit!)

I give each writer three minutes and then they pass. When we've gone through the directions, it's time to share. And guess what? My high schoolers stand up in front of the class and read their writing! That's HUGE in my room.  So did my eighth graders, but it's not quite as big a deal with them :)

Another day, we wrote pass around stories in groups of five to seven. I gave them a story starter prompt (again, found some online), a sheet of paper and a clipboard.  Each student wrote one sentence and then kept passing the clipboard around for fifteen or twenty minutes. The eighth graders were so excited about these that one group acted theirs out!

Finally, we wrote partner stories with Story Cubes. There are many ways to use Story Cubes, but I just rolled the dice and asked kids to write a story, trying to use all the images on the dice. This is tougher than it seems, but it was fun to try and incorporate all the images in the story. They can turn out a little silly, but the important thing was, we have fun putting our ideas on paper.

This all seems so simple as I write it that I'm not sure I should even share these ideas. But it's such a celebration of writing fun in a high school writing class that I just had to. If you had been there to see the smiles and hear the laughter, you'd be celebrating too!