Write Your Best Story Ever! - Creative Writing for 9-12 Year Olds.

This 9 week course will give you the tools and knowledge to write your best story ever! 

Each week we will explore a different element of 'story' and find out author tricks to influence and engage our readers. We will have a go at using the techniques as a group and then you'll be given a homework task where you can experiment with your own writing style. I'll use slides and examples to show you grammar tips, and the group will build and develop great vocabulary that will help you improve your writing.

Class rules! Have a go, do your homework, arrive with a growth mindset and support others in the class. 

Lesson Structures:
Week 1. Exploring how to develop a plot - do stories have a pattern? 
Week 2. Introducing the setting - flash fiction setting descriptions using adjectives and thinking about senses.
Week 3. Introducing characters - exploring powerful verbs and adverbs.
Week 4. Using body language to develop scenes.
Week 5. What makes good dialogue and how can we use it?
Week 6. Building tension - exploring sentence structure, onomatopoeia, alliteration and personification
Week 7. Resolving a story - how can we change word order and clause order to add interest?
Week 8. What makes a good story ending?
Week 9. Reading our stories and critiquing them. What have we learned? What have we enjoyed about our own and others' writing? 

Prior knowledge:
You should be able to write freely and have an idea of 'sentence'. You should have the stamina to write for around 20-30 minutes. Please don't get hung up about spellings - I want you to use the best words in your vocabulary so I have a technique to overcome poor spelling and take it out of the equation. You'll learn this in the first lesson.

Growth Mindset:
I teach using a growth mindset. Did you know the average published author has around 20 rewrites and edits before the book is final? Why should your writing be any different? We will learn editing and improving our work as part of the process.