Fridays are Creative Writing day in my IG class. This has been instituted because at the end of the first quarter I wrote a letter to the class giving my views on our first quarter together. Things I liked about the class, things I thought we had learned and had enjoyed, things I thought I needed to improve. I asked them to write a reply to the letter as an evaluation of the quarter. The class wrote the evaluation in class in 30 minutes (good practice for their exam at the end of the year!). I invited them to be honest, with no fear of retribution! : )
One of the overwhelming "likes" of the class was the time I gave them for creative writing (we studied the 6+1 traits during first quarter) so I decided it was worth continuing this. They write a draft in class time and hand them in for comments from me. I give them back, they file them and before the end of quarter they will choose two to revise and publish.
The last two weeks I have given them free reign in their choice of subject but I noticed that some were struggling for ideas. So this week, I asked the class to keep an "I wonder...." question list. I modelled this by keeping a list of "I wonder..." questions over the weekend and shared them with the class on Monday. They then had to compile questions for Friday. They then shared 3 or so of these with the rest of the class this morning and chose ideas from the questions to write on. They didn't have to answer the question, just use it as a prompt for ideas. They didn't have to use this if they had a clear idea of what they wanted to write. Some of the class started stories last week and are continuing them.
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