Creative Writing Lesson Plan Ideas

If you are an English teacher, you will more than likely need a few creative writing lesson plan ideas on deck for your classes. Much more than a traditional lesson plan, a writing lesson plan will need to be infused with novel thoughts in order to arrive at solid creative writing lesson plan ideas. When it comes to creativity in writing, all you have to do is fill your lesson plan with recognizable aspects of the arts to arrive at peak perfect creative writing lesson plan ideas.

Sometimes it can be a bit of a challenge to teach young minds how to think and write creatively. In that instance you should stop and clear your mind of all of the chaos, and then keep it simple. The key to creativity is the simplicity. If you keep your lessons simple then you will be able to get through to your students. 

Lesson Plan Ideas for Creative Writing

There are several great creative ideas you can use as lesson plans to get your students writing. Below are a few examples that you can work from.

Brain-Scrambler

There are no wrong answers in this exercise. The purpose is simply to rev up the creative juices and get them working proactively.

• Students will have three minutes to write whatever is on their minds without really thinking about it.
• At the end of the three minutes the instructor will collect all of the entries and randomly select several students to disclose what they wrote about.
• Each student has just about 30 seconds to discuss what they wrote and why they wrote it.

This exercise can be done daily at the start of class as a drill.

Five-Sentence Paragraph

This will require discipline and will more than likely take the students the duration of the period to complete.

• Students are to write a five-sentence paragraph.
• The catch is: they cannot repeat any word or contraction twice and, unlike the Brain-Scrambler, the five-sentence paragraph will be required to be complete with a theme that keeps the sentences interwoven. 
• The five sentence paragraph must make perfect sense.
• This will be a challenge because the students will need to tap into their vocabularies as well as their ability to describe something so that it makes sense.

Once the students have accomplished this task, then the teacher can read the paragraphs to the class without divulging the name of the student author and get feedback on what the students think makes sense.

Two-Sentence Response

In this lesson on descriptive writing (a major aspect of creative writing) students will be expected to review a list of situations to which they will need to write a two-sentence response. An example of a situation that the students would need to respond to is as follows:

• You are lost in the dessert with nothing to eat but sand and tumbleweed. How do you feel?
• You are a 10 year old child and it is your first day at a new school? How do you feel?
• Relate a train ride in New York to peace of mind.

Each response should be completed in two sentences only and will require the students to think carefully and creatively in order to better arrive at a good answer.

Obfuscatory Sentences

In this exercise, students will be expected to learn how to recognize which sentence(s) are lacking content.

• The teacher will write out a long sentence that has no apparent meaning.
• The students will discuss the sentence amongst themselves and come up with sentences related to what you wrote that do have a semblance of meaning.
• After approximately 15 minutes, you (the teacher) should have the students tell you if the sentence that you wrote has meaning, as well as present to you and the class an original sentence that does have meaning.

You can take any of the above mentioned activities and strategically use them in your creative writing lesson plan as you teach throughout the year. Creativity in writing is an ongoing thing, just like learning.