5 Ideas to Make Writing Part of Your Elementary Classroom Routine

Prompts  are commonly used in creative writing workshops to get the creative juices flowing. Here are some examples to try with your students:

• Choose an object, toy, figurine, stuffed animal, etc. and ask your students to make up a colourful story about it.
• Show your students a selection of photos or works of art. Have them choose one and write a text about the thoughts or emotions it inspires. It could be a short story, a poem, or something else. You can also use cards from a game like Dixit as prompts.
• Use two-noun prompts that pair seemingly unrelated words, such as housefly and shoes or dinosaur and motorcycle, to inspire students to write a silly story.
• Ask thought-provoking questions such as “What would happen if there were no more nights?” or “What if we could travel through time?”

Exquisite corpses are a great way to make learning fun. For example, you can use them to review parts of speech or sentence structure. In this exercise, every student adds one word or one phrase to a collective story, but they can only see the last word or phrase that was written. The result? A nonsensical story that will have your class in stitches!

Brainstorming with your students can encourage them to think outside the box when working on a writing exercise. Here are a few things you can try:

• Have students make a list of gross words (or their favourite words) and then write a text using as many of them as possible.
• Ask students to imagine what might happen after a story ends.
• Let students pick whatever topic they want for writing exercises.
• Explore word relationships and semantic fields.

Incorporating a creative element into writing exercises pushes students to challenge themselves while still following the curriculum. There are many activities that can help students tap into their creativity through writing:

• Making up gross recipes
• Taking a well-known song and changing the lyrics
• Rewriting the dialogue in a comic strip
• Writing a survival guide for being shipwrecked on a desert island
• Imagining a conversation or interview with a superhero, monster, alien, etc.
• Writing the wildest story they can think of
• Etc.

Social interaction can enrich writing activities. Cooperative learning in the form of discussion groups, pair writing, writing workshops, and peer tutoring leads to higher-quality texts and increases student interest in writing. You can put this into practice in a number of ways:

• Foster an environment where students feel comfortable making mistakes and receiving constructive criticism from peers.
• Have students work in pairs.
• Encourage students to personalize their notebooks in the style of an interactive notebook (similar to scrapbooking) and share pieces they are particularly proud of with the class.
• Etc.