Home » Writing & Publishing » Teaching Creative Writing » Creative Writing Lesson Plans

Creative Writing Lesson Plans

© Gloria Campos-Hensley

After you have created the "writing room"...

Look at your class schedule. How much time do you have to teach? How much time per-day? How many weeks do you have in the semester? What type of writing do you want to concentrate on? Poetry? Fiction? Nonfiction? Journalism? Screenwriting? Comics? Maybe you want to try a little bit of every form. Whichever form or writing, remember to pick a genre or a theme that you know a lot about. The more you know about your subject the more confident you will feel about teaching it. If you want to learn a new genre with them, go ahead, but let them know this and share your work with them. Here is a little secret, if you study the new material ahead of time, you will not be as lost when you are learning it with your students.

Reading, Sharing and Relating...

Share work with them from experienced authors in that genre. Give them as many examples as you can possibly provide, and if you have time, give them a little bit of the authors' history. If your students can relate to an author, a teacher, a famous person, an average adult or child, they can relax and feel more comfortable when expressing themselves.

Pick and plan it out...

You should always have some sort of plan going into your classroom, even if you are an expert in the topic, because you do not just need to know about the topic itself, but you need to know how to teach it. After all, a teacher who knows everything about anything, except teaching isn't a teacher, just a very smart person. Just Children...

You must also remember that they are children; therefore, despite how meticulous your lesson plan may be, things will not always work out as planned. Sometimes instead of teaching creative writing, you will find yourself teaching spelling and punctuation. For the non-native speakers in your class you will find yourself translating. Oddly enough, sometimes you will even find yourself explaining math, science and history. That's okay!Try to do what you can to stick to your topic, but most of all have fun. Do not get boggled down with curriculums and rules. The more students see you enjoying your class, the more they will enjoy it.

One last thing, when you are creating your lesson plans, remember, too much too fast can be confusing for a child. Try to teach no more than one genre per week, at most. If your students still need more time to understand, perhaps it is too difficult. If this is the case, change the genre or give them some more time. Perhaps try a different teaching method.

The copyright of the article Creative Writing Lesson Plans in Teaching Creative Writing is owned by Gloria Campos-Hensley. Permission to republish Creative Writing Lesson Plans in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.