creative writing – Page 2 – A Journey in TEFL

July 10, 2013August 7, 2015 Eva Buyuksimkesyan creative writing, efl, esl, narratives, past tenses, pre reading activity, reading short stories, story writing, writing

Creative Guided Story Writing

I’d like to share a guided writing activity that I adapted for my classes.

Give students a card and ask them to read the instructions.

Tell them they are going to invent a story about what happened to the characters on their cards.

Give them the pre-prepared questions and ask them to answer the questions Tell them these questions will guide them to write their stories. They may add any additional parts to their stories.

You can even give them the characters from the novels or short stories. It can even be a good pre reading activity for a story unit.

I prepared a Google document for the instructions and another for the questions and I’ll add more when I come up with an interesting idea. May I also invite you to add your instructions and questions?

Note: You can prepare your cards on powerpoint slides and save them as JPEG, print and laminate them for many uses.

June 19, 2013June 19, 2013 Eva Buyuksimkesyan efl, esl, fun, fun activities, lesson ideas, lesson plans, listening, music, plans, songs, writing

Boat on the River

I’ve decided to prepare song lessons that I can use in class. I’m planning to share them regularly. If you love using songs in the class, please visit the blog for a new song lesson every week. I will also be very happy to hear your ideas.

A new song lesson

June 15, 2013August 2, 2015 Eva Buyuksimkesyan creative writing, efl, esl, language is a virus, web 2.0, writing

Yes ! Language is a virus :)

Have you come across this hilarious site.?

“Every day, write a letter that will never be sent to a person who does or does not exist, or to a number of people who do or do not exist.”

The sentence I copied and pasted from Language is a Virus is a writing task. Isn’t it very creative?

If you visit the site you will find writing games, text generators, writing tasks, poetry guide and really cool writing exercises.

I tried some of them and I’m now thinking this site will be a place where I will visit very often in the next school year.

January 30, 2011 Eva Buyuksimkesyan efl, fun, glogster, lesson ideas, lesson plans, listening, poems, reading, songs, teaching, writing, writing games

A Poetry Lesson

1. Choose a poem to read with your students.

2. Write the title on the board and ask students to predict what the poem is about.

3. Divide the class in groups.

4. Give each group a copy of a word cloud you prepared previously.

5. Ask students to write a poem using the words from the word clouds.

6. Compare the poems of each group. (You may want to ask each group read the poems in their groups and mark them according to a criteria you prepared)

7. Distribute the original poem and see the similarities and differences.

8. Discuss the poem

9. Ask students to write their feelings about the poem.

Follow up:

Students can create glogs for their poems.
Students in groups can draw the picture of the poem.
Students in groups can prepare a wall display with their poems and the original one and the word cloud and drawings.

Alternative: You can do the same activity with a song.

More Go and Open the door poems here and the poem is also here

April 28, 2010May 16, 2010 Eva Buyuksimkesyan glogster, grammar, web 2.0, writing

Go and Open the Door

I really love this poem and when I come across with it in Creative Poetry Writing with a great activity and as we were doing conditionals, even if, as long as and some other conjunctions I wanted to do the activity with my students.

I’ll quickly summarize it.

Tell your students that they will write poems but before writing they will discover something.

They will have pen and paper while listening to you

Begin telling ‘ You just discovered a hidden door in the classroom, where is it?’

Imagine what might be behind the door

Time to open it now. Go and open the door and step in.

You are in a room now and while walking you get amazed because you see all the memories from your past.

What do you find? Describe

You decide you will come back again but before leaving take just one thing with you.

Leave the room and come back to the class

What will you do now? Share your experience with us.

Read the poem or give it as handouts

Tell them they are going to write a poem similar to it.

FEEDBACK: They said they enjoyed the activity. I was amazed watching them while writing they were writing as they were hypnotised. When they finished, they decided to create glogs with their poems.

I really love them when they volunteer creating things with web 2.0

Here is what Burak wrote and you can read the others here