Freeing the Imagination

Young students are always auditing themselves, judging their thoughts “right” and “wrong,” “acceptable” and “not acceptable.”  This exercise frees their imaginations to indulge in a bit of wild creativity, which can bleed, in a milder form, into their essays.

A story needs characters, a location, and a conflict.  Create three columns representing three characters.  Going around the class, each student can supply a single characteristic for each character, the location where the three meet, and the problem which they are called upon to solve.  Some major characteristics would be gender, size, profession, religion, nationality, maybe a personal quirk.  You might end up with a 5′, Catholic, French, female lawyer with a stutter, a 6′, atheist, male, French soccer player who knits, and a 3′, agnostic, non-gendered alien who can see auras around peoples’ heads. The location where they meet might be a baseball game, and the problem they need to solve might be catching a fly ball heading in their direction.

After participating in establishing the characters, location, and conflict, students gather in groups of four or five and create a 2- or 3-paragraph story from this information.  This takes fifteen or twenty minutes.  Then the stories are read aloud.

This exercise is always fun, and can be offered at the end of a unit as a reward, or before tackling a new essay, when their writers’ blocks are active.

linguistics in the classroom, principles of good writing, teaching writing

Miscellaneous, psycholinguistics