There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, like teaching. You can be so joyously idealistic in everything you choose to teach!
Planning my units on narrative and imaginative writing, and descriptive writing was almost as inspiring as writing itself. Well, not really, but you know…
I made a whole plan on how to introduce the idea of story-writing. The effective opening. The appropriate ending. Dialogue, atmosphere, character, setting.
For each, I mentioned resource material that I will use in class – pieces of music, video clips, extracts from stories and plays… Even pieces of cloth and chocolate. Because inspiration truly comes from anywhere.
(And I’m not just being mean to students who have no desire to write – it’s part of their course to explore abstract inspiration!)
I planned classroom activities – group activities where the students begin with the same sentences and seek to explore different moods, individual activities where each student brings a picture and passes it on to another student…
Everything is set.
Now comes the challenge.
The students find it difficult to make sentences, let alone stories.
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