Hi All,

I've been asked to run a writers' group at my school. I'm busy building up a small portfolio of writing exercises and wondered if anyone wanted to add. The classes will most likely be run at dinner time, which gives us half an hour, or possibly after school, which will give us a whole hour. The age group is going to be 9-11, so I can't really ask them to turn out the 3,000 words that Terry Edge's Million Monkeys do each week .

I have lots of stuff on pulling together the elements of a short story, but what I'm really after is short, stretching exercises. Here's a couple of example ideas:

1) Each child has a sheet of paper and writes an opening sentence of a story. When complete, the sheet is passed to the person on the left. They read the top sentence, write their own, then fold the first sentence over. The paper is passed left again. From hereon, each child can only see the last sentence written. The game continues until we decide to wrap it up and read them out.

2) Each child dips into a hat and secretly reads their character: Angry, Sad, Shy, Silly, Boring, Lazy, and then go on to write a letter of complaint. When we read them out, they have to sort them back into the character groups.

The thing is, I don't want to do just stories, in the same way that drama groups don't just rehearse plays. Any other ideas, or pointers to good, fun books on the subject would be a great help.

Thanks,

Colin M

One we've done in CW Class: passing round fruit and vegatables, and writing down a list of words to describe them - nice, because you can eat and work. Someone in our class even ate the garlic.


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With regard to books, my tutor dips into The Five-Minute Writer by Margret Geraghty.

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A useful dialogue exercise involves role playing:
Give pair of students a situation to act out, eg, pupil going to see the headmaster.
The person playing the pupil is given a few lines to help their characterisation, eg, 'you've been missing school to look after your little brother when he's sick, because mum works full time and can't afford to take time off work to stay home'.
The person playing the head teacher is also given a snippet of information to work from, eg, 'You're meeting a pupil who is a persistant truant'
These pieces of information are known only to the people who have been given them, and it's up to them to decide how and when to use/impart that information.

I do a sensory perception exercise with children. I tell them to only write down things I don't already know, and to use all five senses. Let loose in the playground, they're off, sniffing walls, squidging wet leaves between their fingers, hanging upside down from swings to describe the inverted sky. They come back with the most outstanding poems, and none of them ever died from having a lick of a window or a sandpit.

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The advantage of this exercise is that you instantly bypass that dreary 'school CW workshop' creation whereby they write boring prose on separate lines to create the look of a poem that neither rhymes nor scans but tells you trees are green and rain is wet, and you have to pretend it's brilliant because they're children. I've seen rubbish produced at school workshops which is an insult to their creativity, intelligence and robustness, because the CW tutors are so quick to admire any old timid tat the children spout for fear of being wrong. If you tell them not to bore you they'll handle it better than most adults.

Another good one is to get half the group to be aliens arriving at our planet and finding a tree. How do they explain it to their HQ (can't use words like leaves etc as they don't have them) and what do they think it is?
The other half of the group are humans who befriend the aliens and have to explain what a tree is and why it exists.

Ooooh, thanks, Cherys. I recently attended a workshop on Neuro Linguistic Programming. It included some mild hypnosis and fun parlor tricks. It was all about positive thinking to get positive results, but a lot of the games and ideals could be used for the school writers' group.

Mind you, I'm not sure how the Head will react to the idea of me hypnotising the kids.

Something I did on an Arvon course but it would work for youngsters is every body has three small pieces of paper. On each one they have to write a job, a place and an event. All the pieces of paper are put into three piles and everyone takes a piece from each, and then has to write some sort of story or scene about it.

Michelle

I've done that one, Michelle, and it is good fun.
Our piles included:
Scene: Museum, Barn, Hotel,
Item: Umbrella, Perfume, Letter,
Person: Thief, Gardener,..
Can't remember the others.

We had a fun one at a writers' group several months before the first episode of Lost appeared on TV. It followed the same idea: we'd been shipwrecked on an island and everyone had an identity and had to interact with each other, deciding what we wanted to tell and what we didn't - we could even lie. We used that as a starting point for writing. Quite fun. I think I ended up on the fire