Follow Up Lesson Ideas for the Writing Workshop

The writing workshop is designed to introduce children to ideas about character development, using powerful language, and writing and revising a stories. During the workshop the children will have time only to write the beginning one or two pages of the story. The main follow up activity therefore is to complete the story.

Before writing the rest of their stories:

1. Get the children to think about how their story should develop. You can discuss story structures - beginnings, middles and ends, by referring to well known stories and getting children to identify these sections. What would make for a satisfying middle and end to their story? Does their plot make sense? Is it exciting? Does it make the reader feel excited, scared, sad, happy? Or does it break the first rule of writing - don't bore you reader? A general rule for writers to keep readers interested is to make sure the reader always wants to know the answer to some question. Why is going to happen when the hero meets the bad guy? What is the meaning of the mysterious message the hero received? How is the hero going to get revenge against the bad guy? How is the hero going to escape? And a general rule for an ending is to make sure all the important questions are answered. There should be a few clues in the story so the reader has a chance to guess what the answers will be, and perhaps some red herrings.

2. Another very important aspect of story-telling which the children should think about is, do their characters act and speak in believable ways? Do they act according to how the character was described on the character sheet? For example, if the character is supposed to be a tough pirate, does he act and speak like a tough pirate? (or perhaps he doesn't always act tough because of a weakness he has, like being afraid of mice). If a character is a five year old, does he or she speak like a five year old? This is the taking perspective aspect of character writing, and it is important children think about it when rewriting their story.

3. You might encourage the children to do as much work on another character in their story as they did on their main one. Most stories need at least two well-developed characters.

After writing the rest of their stories:

4. When the children have finished the first draft of their story you can either look at them yourself and make comments, including spelling and grammar, or get children to swap stories and do it for each other - or perhaps both. Then they can write a final draft, perhaps typing it for display.

5. You may want to let some children read their finished stories to the whole class, so they can get more feedback. If they type them you can email them to me and I will post them on my website. I will give a prize (books) to the best stories after Christmas.

6. You might get children to convert their stories into play scripts, and then rehearse and perform a few of them in groups. This will focus them on writing good dialogue, and also having to act convincingly will reinforce the skill of getting inside a character's head. Speaking dialogue out loud is very useful tool for writers, to find out if a character's speech sounds right (and also if their prose in general sounds good).