I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get tired of reading the same old stories, with the same old archetypal characters and plots. The predictability of story lines is the reason I stopped reading Fantasy novels a couple of years ago. Oh, I’m sure I’ll return to my favorite authors, especially once that fifth book is released, for which I’ve been waiting three long years. But for now, they’ll stay on the shelf. Well I hate to admit it, but this boredom sometimes extends to my children’s work. If I have to read another variation of Steve’s (from Minecraft) conflicts with creepers and Ender dragons, I might have to ban all Minecraft games and paraphernalia from the house. Out of sight, out of mind, right? I won’t need to go to extremes, though, because I realized that there is more to creative writing than stories and poetry. To freshen the kids’ writing, I decided to switch gears every once in a while. My children love music, and they often belt out a popular tune, replacing the original lyrics with their own. It turns out that this is a fun writing activity. After they choose a song, we take one verse, usually the chorus, and make up new lyrics for them. The goal, since this is writing instruction, is to ensure the lyrics make sense and follow the rhythm of the music. We have been studying ancient civilizations, and no matter which culture we study, the kids have a particular interest in the daily lives of the children. History studies are a great time for them to pretend to be one of these children and write to an imaginary pen pal from the period. They are not only writing historical fiction but also synthesizing what they have learned in order to write the letter in a realistic way. In relation to letter writing, greeting cards are a fun way to practice creative writing. I provide the kids with a focus, such as birthday cards, and allow them to create blurbs geared toward different age groups and themes. For example, they might create a birthday card greeting for a 6 year old who likes Legos. The kids get practice writing for a particular audience and writing with a theme. I might even save some money by having them make up a set of Christmas or other holiday cards. I’m sure I’m not the only parent that has witnessed a few adventures played out around the house. Mine are partial to traipsing through the kitchen casting spells on one another, or on me if I get in the way, so I thought, “Why not let them write a script?” I’m sure to give them scene limitations, so I don’t end up with an epic, and when done, they act it out and revise it where necessary. By letting my kids explore different genres, it’s helped them avoid boredom with their writing and allowed them to discover other creative writing forms that excite them.
Teacher Resources
Five Simple Tips for Revising
Let’s face it. Writing is fun. It’s the revising we avoid. When we first write, our pen goes wherever our ideas lead; we create characters and situations, mold them and direct them at will. Then we sit back, marinating in the satisfaction of our finished work. Enter the dreaded voice of revision, whose sole purpose is to highlight all that stinks about our wonderful composition. Of course we don’t want to deal with it, and children are no different in this respect. But as Katherine Patterson says, revising is the process when spilled milk gets turned into ice cream. It’s necessary if our children are to become better writers. Even though the revision process isn’t always a child’s favorite part of writing, it doesn’t need to be a chore. With the following tips, it may even become an interesting, dare I say enjoyable, activity. 1.) Step back: After your child finishes a first draft, let her bask in her greatness. Don’t mention revising right away. Let her read the draft to you and talk about it. Then just have her put the draft aside for a few days before she takes it out again to revise. The extra time will allow her to wind down from all that energy she just spent writing it and will put the draft out of her mind. In turn, she will come back to her work with fresh eyes and a clear, less biased, perspective. She will not only be better able to identify weaknesses but she will also be more open to fixing them. 2.) Collaborate: A completely different set of eyes is always helpful in the revising process. If you don’t have other children in your home with which to workshop, get your child together with another homeschooler who is also working on a writing project. Teach them how to read and constructively comment on each other’s papers. Working with other children will help your child get feedback from a real audience and evaluate her own work through her readers’ eyes. 3.) Read aloud: Though often overlooked, it’s one of the most effective revising strategies. Reading a paper aloud helps the writer hear rhythm and voice. She will get a sense of where the piece flows and where it is stunted, where ideas are unclear or wordy, and where it goes off topic. When your child returns to her draft, have her read it aloud (alone if she is uncomfortable reading in front of others) and take notes when she finds something that needs to be changed, added to, or removed. 4.) Type it: If your child does not know how to type, it’s worth teaching her. It’s a skill that can be learned at a young age and will make revising and editing easier. Unless your child is a fluent typist, she should write the first draft, and then type it in a Microsoft Word document. The act of typing will itself highlight areas in need of change, but more than this, it will make revising and editing less tedious. If a sentence needs to be moved, she needs only to cut and paste to change it. If she needs to add a sentence or even a paragraph, she won’t need to rewrite the whole paper; she can just insert the new information. 5.) Work from paper: After your child types her draft, print a hard copy to work from when revising and editing. Often what gets overlooked on a computer screen will stand out on a hard copy; however, it will still be easier to change since the original is easy to access and manipulate on the computer.
Everybody Is Different: Varied Characters Make For Believable Characters
No two people are alike. For that matter, no two animals are alike either! One mark of a great story is believable characters, each with his or her own distinct personality and habits. Author Kaley Birchfield is only eleven years old. Her story, “A Home for Barney” (the featured story from our March/April 2014 issue), is only six pages long. Somehow, in those six short pages, Kaley manages to bring to life a whole host of human and animal characters. How does she do it? There’s the narrator, Christy, a young woman who works at a goat farm. From the first sentence, we see that Christy loves nature. As the story goes on, we learn that she is emotional, loving, and a bit of a worrier. Christy’s co-worker, Marla, seems kind of slow at first. Little by little, we see that, while Marla may not say much, she is wise, and she feels things deeply. Their boss, Jenny, is a take charge kind of person, full of confidence. But she has a soft side and feels sad, like Christy does, when Barney the goat has to leave. Then there’s Barney and another goat, Mocha. They couldn’t be more different from each other. Barney is gentle, calm, and affectionate. Mocha is unfriendly and moody. Even the family that arrives at the end of the story has well-drawn characters, especially the bubbly, impulsive youngest sister, Autumn. It would be boring if Kaley simply listed each character’s distinguishing qualities. Instead, she shows us what each character is like through their words, actions, gestures, and speech. Marla seems unemotional, but the goodbye hug she gives Christy speaks volumes. Christy’s emotions are up and down as she and Barney are separated and reunited more than once. At different times Christy’s shoulders sag, she can’t sleep, she has a lump in her throat. She is overjoyed when Barney runs up to her after their separations. When Autumn realizes how sad Christy is to lose Barney, she blurts out her family’s address and tells Christy to come visit. Why do we write stories? Why do we read them? You can probably think of many answers to these questions. Maybe we like to leave our own lives for a little while and lose ourselves in the lives of others. Maybe we have feelings of sadness that we can’t express, and a sad story helps us tap into our own feelings and get them out. And no matter how young or how old we are, we can always learn. We can learn how to be better people, more loving toward each other and our pets, more understanding, better able to cope with loss and change. But before we can get all these benefits from a story, we must believe in it. We must believe that the characters are real.
