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Rewrite Story Endings to Develop Creative Writing Skills

Tags

ELA: Writing ^21st Century Skills K-8 Strategy

Skills

Flexible Thinking Organization Verbal Reasoning

Rewrite Story Endings to Develop Creative Writing Skills

If your student is self-conscious about or has difficulty generating ideas for creative writing

How To Apply It!

  1. Take a story your students enjoy and propose a few "what if" scenarios. What if the character had turned right instead of left? What if the character had confronted the monster rather than run away? Often a few good questions are all children need to get started thinking creatively and rewriting a new ending all their own. Or let the students come up with their own "what ifs."
  2. Alternatively, have the students re-write a sad ending so that the story ends happily, tragically, or ridiculously.
  3. Writing roulette is another option in which students pass a notebook around, each writing a single sentence on the page, until a full story develops.
  4. Games like Story Cubes or other story starters provide another twist on this approach.

Why It Works (the Science Of Learning)!

Every child is born with an immense amount of creativity but for a variety of reasons students may lose confidence developing or sharing their unique ideas. The goal of these exercises is to build confidence in expressing ideas without fear of criticism. By building off of others, they do not need to take full responsibility for the idea but still have opportunities to think creatively. Over time, you will want to reduce the prompts so students are comfortable writing entirely on their own.