Play, talk, write!
Get your students excited and ready to write before they’ve even picked up a pen.
Meet Jennifer Claessen, one of Ministry of Stories’ expert Writing Facilitators and the author of four books for 8-12 year olds; with number five out on World Book Day this week! She teaches creative writing in theatres, cemetery parks and many other places, to both adults (her oldest student is 94) and children (her youngest student is just four).
Jennifer’s top tips for verbal drafting
This term, I’ve been working with the wonderful Year 3s at Rushmore Primary School in Hackney and it has been so fun to compile an anthology of all their brilliant writing.
We’ve been celebrating the school’s 150th birthday with visits from aliens, meetings with the hedgehog who lives under the school (and the owl who lives on the roof!), birthday cake and songs as well as, of course, 300 years of time travel back into the past and the future!
It has been an oracy-led project with a focus on ‘verbal drafting’ meaning we talk a lot before our pens ever hit the paper! We work through a ‘chatty pyramid’ of coming up with ideas in pairs, then small groups and finally sharing as a whole class before we then write down our very best ideas.
Here are some other ideas to get ideas out of heads and onto paper:
- Write on the move!
As we are celebrating the school, we have moved around it too. We’ve written in the lunch hall, in the library, even on the playground. In order to make writing fun, I think sometimes we need to break the association it has with sitting down at a desk, staring at a blank sheet of paper.
We move quite a lot in the classroom too, cycling around different exercises on a ‘poetry carousel’ and singing as we go! I personally have all my best ideas whilst cycling and, as a fidgety person, find it very hard to focus if my body isn’t moving!
- Write what we can touch!
The Year 3s have tried on some strange costumes, handled many an animal puppet (carefully so that no-one was prickled by the hedgehog!) and stepped through a time machine.
Whilst imagination is very important, it can help to start from a lived experience, even if the time machine is a paper one stuck to the classroom door!
We talk about what we are doing and how we are doing it (time travelling by doing star jumps then becoming as small as a piece of grass!) and having felt the big, dizzy energy of time travel, we can then make our writing more convincing.
Even though I’m an author, not an actor, I like to act out scenes before I commit them to paper and it has been wonderful to watch the Year 3s do this too.
- Write without words!
Ministry of Stories is founded on playfulness and so there was an important contract of mutual silliness in this project. We began by meeting aliens – Glogglogglians specifically – who sadly do not speak any language recognisable to us here on Earth.
Luckily, we managed to communicate in wordless ways including our facial expressions, gestures and intonation. So much of storytelling happens alongside the words we use and this makes ‘writing’ accessible to everyone.
We then translated the noises of the aliens (and wow, there were some brilliant noises!) and in sharing the pressure of creativity, we were able to collaborate on wonderful work. If ever you find yourself stuck for something to say or write, try a silly noise instead, you never know what might come of it.
