Creative Writing

[Rosie_0801]

My sister lives in Kenya, and her "Masaai Mamma" runs a school. It only started this year, with a babies class, but obviously in the future she'll have a class running with each grade. The obligatory exam at the end of grade four has a creative writing component which the Masaai kids always bomb on because they have no imagination. The example my sister gave was "What would you do if you were a fireman for a day?" Now I don't know if they even have firemen in that area, but that issue aside, the typical answer would be "Is it a big or small fire? If it is big, put it out. If it is small, we can cook on it."

 

I, personally, don't see a problem with realism and sort of view this as an "ask a silly question..." scenario. However, they are as intelligent as everyone else so it's a shame they are losing marks there because they can't write a silly paragraph. So, does anyone have ideas on how to equip these kids to do a bit better? Their teachers are Masaai too, so they are probably just the same.

 

Rosie

[Amber in AUS]

Well, you know i have not BTDT just yet but here is what i would do. I think i would encourage them to listen in to some really good literature, have the teachers read to them and discuss the things they are hearing about. Also looking at pictures in books can be inspirational. I think i would take a look at Bravewriter too which will encourage the teacher to incorporate more writing into their weeks which in turn should produce better results.

[swellmomma]

I think since this is a babies class that will grow up into that gr 4 class eventually they should incorporate lots of picture narration, life narration and storytime(teachers make up stories, songs and poems to tell the children), play make believe games with the children as they grow into toddlers/preschoolers etc. Do this for the first several years to work on nuturing that imagination before they are old enough to start story writing.

[Rosie_0801]

Tricky, isn't it? They don't have picture books, and don't actually have any paper at the moment. Maybe if I can get some money saved up, I'll go garage saleing and see if I can collect some cheap but ok books. I'd have thought they would have an oral storytelling tradition, since everyone who doesn't write seems to. I'll have to ask my sister about that.

 

I'll have a look at Bravewriter when my internet connection is feeling more co-operative. The teachers would definately need something to teach them how to teach because they're a product of the same system. I suppose exercises could be done orally, couldn't they? If the teacher provides a scenario and everyone, teacher included, gives a different explanation of what could happen. I guess it would be hard to begin with, but at least it is progress that could be made without needing paper! Our aunt is collecting discarded school supplies from the tip for me to box up and send over. Ah, if I was rich, I could totally equip the school, as well as my own! Heheh. At least my sister has figured out if we send donations to the school, she won't have to pay tax on it. If she does, it's too expensive for her to receive stuff!

 

Thanks, ladies.

 

:)

Rosie

[Nan in Mass]

I had to teach my own children to answer silly questions like this. They still aren't very good at it, but the following helped a lot. It is mostly a matter of expansion. Their answer is a perfectly good one; it is just too brief. The first part of expanding is to practise listing events in a story or steps in a task in a chronological order. Taking the fireman example, I would have said something like, "Right. The first thing firemen need to do is decide what to do with each fire. If it is a big fire, the firemen need to put it out. If it is a small cooking fire, they can call someone to cook over it and watch it. So, if it were a big fire, what would they need to do next, after they decided to put it out?" The idea is to ask for more and more details. Someone is likely to suggest squirt water on the fire or shovel dirt onto it. Then you would ask how the person would do that. I aimed for three steps to begin with, then when my children were giving me three steps instead of one, I began expanding each of those three. Even easier than this is to write some out-of-order steps out on a blackboard, or tell the children three or four or five steps (or however many they can keep track of in their head), and have them put them in order. When they can do steps of a familiar task, have them do easy unfamiliar tasks. That promotes imagination and problem solving. Knowing the steps first makes it easier. If they are going swimming and one of the steps it take off their clothes and they say put on the bathingsuit first, then they will be left with a step that doesn't fit at the end, so it isn't necessary to correct them until they say they are all done. When they can put steps in order, then you can start trying to get them to give you steps for a familiar task and question them to get them to give you more detail. You can also, at the same time, have them begin to unscramble parts of a short, familiar story. When they can do that, then you can teach them a story and have them tell it back to you. When they can do that, you can teach them the question words "who, what, where, why, when, and how" and begin to ask them to make sure all those elements are included in the stories they tell. When they can do that, you can begin to ask them questions that aren't in the original edition of the story. So if the story is Goldilocks and the Three bears, you can ask them what colour Goldilocks's dress is. This is where the protests begin. You have to introduce the idea of guessing when they aren't ever going to know the answer and it doesn't matter anyway. Very silly, but for some reason, people want children to be able to do this. Meanwhile, you keep working on telling the steps to things, but you make the things less everyday, ending with wild things like, "How would you get to the moon?" While working with the stories, you talk about the five senses and start getting them to add three madeup details involving sight, sound, touch, smell, or taste, so Goldilocks has a blue dress, the bears growled, and birds were singing in the woods. By now, you are getting pretty imaginative. Add in feelings and describing feelings, and you have a pretty good retelling of a story. You can try to get them to retell one story many times with different details. Eventually, you can teach them to make up a story. To make up a story, you have to invent a character, give them a problem, and then tell the steps they used to solve the problem. These have to be pretty simple at first, but then they can begin adding the answers to their question words, description, and feelings. Then you have to make sure that they know that when someone says "pretend", or "what would you do" or "imagine" that they mean for them to make up a story and tell the steps. Meanwhile, the listing steps in a task can develop into telling what they did yesterday in chronological order. Another useful how-to-expand excersize is to pick a topic like dogs and get the children to tell you three things about dogs, like they are mammals, they live with people, and they have tails. For mountain, they could say they are high, they are hard to climb, and they have rocks and snow on top (or something like that). When they can do it for concrete objects, they can do it for verbs, and then abstract ideas like love. You can get them to expand each of their three things into three more things and this is the beginning of a report about something. If there is a tradition of storytelling (I would be surprised if there weren't), the children can go home, get someone to tell them a story, and then try to retell the story for the class.

 

All of these things are fairly simple to do so your sister could probably teach the teacher how. They work well as group projects, and don't need pencil and paper. The children could begin learning to do them right now, as babies. They work, too. Just reading stories might not, judging by how many stories my children had read and how incapable they were of telling the simplest of them in order, at the beginning.

 

Wouldn't a few blackboards be more practical than pencils and paper, at least to begin with?

 

-Nan

[SonshineLearner]

I have to say that IEW might fit this. It shows how to take a simple B&W drawing and expand with a "Key Word Outline". They use English, yes? They probably don't have a computer, right? You should ask for donations:-) You've been on here too long to be a scammer:-) I wonder how much it'd cost to send things from the US... Brainstorm with us, and perhaps we can help them:-)

 

Carrie:-)

[Matryoshka]

Your sister might want to take a look at Barbara Mariconda's The Most Wonderful Writing Lessons Ever. It's for grades 2-4, and is a slim volume costing only about $10, but packs a lot in.

 

My mom used to use this with her ps class, and has been teaching a homeschool class to a group of kids (including mine) for the past few years.

 

Being a ps curriculum, it is very creative writing oriented, but what makes it very different is that it has very specific instructions to the kids (and the teacher!) as to what they should be doing. It focuses on:

 

1. Interesting beginnings

2. Elaborative detail

3. Suspense

4. The Main Event

5. Story endings

6. Effective dialog

 

What makes this good to do with a group is that it has a lot of brainstorming and sharing of stories, and unlike most creative writing programs I've seen, it gives lots of specific examples and techniques. For example, instead of starting a story with "This is a story about..." or even "Once upon a time", try starting with a question, dialog, thoughts or feelings, an action, or a sound effect (boom! or crash!).

 

Another good thing is that part of a story is worked on at a time in small manageable chunks before having to put the whole thing together.

 

She'd probably have to alter the prompts - I have a pretty good idea that a bunch of Masai kids wouldn't have any more idea how to write a story about a mermaid than a fireman. But they must have traditional folktales, an oral tradition?? Surely she could use some elements from them to illustrate imaginative stories, even without books?

 

I'm honestly not a big fan of creative writing for young kids, but if you have to go there (either for a test or because your mother enthusiastically offers a free class and you can't say no), this is the best thing I've seen.

 

After she went through this with my older kids, my mom tried out the new thing her old ps was using, which was Lucy Calkins. She hated it. She finds it utterly vague as well as so verbose it's almost impossible for the teacher to wade through to get to the "meat". The Barabara Mariconda has few words and much meat.

[Rosie_0801]

Wouldn't a few blackboards be more practical than pencils and paper, at least to begin with?

-Nan

 

Thanks for all that, Nan. I will send the link to this thread to my sister so she can keep an eye on it. And yes, a few blackboards would be more useful than paper, but the school won't start making a profit until next year.

 

They use English, yes? They probably don't have a computer, right? You should ask for donations:-) You've been on here too long to be a scammer:-) I wonder how much it'd cost to send things from the US... Brainstorm with us, and perhaps we can help them:-)

Carrie:-)

 

They use English to a greater or lesser degree. Actually Maa is their mother tongue, then in the "babies class" (3 and 4 year olds) they start Kiswahili and I think they start English in grade one. The teachers have reasonable English. Enough to get around in, but not perfect and not terribly well practised because it is only really used in school in that area. No computer, no electricity as far as I know. Hehehe, I'm no scammer and I'm pretty sure my sister isn't either :) but I'm not going to ask for donations. We all have our own pet charities if we have enough money left over after our own needs are taken care of.

 

Your sister might want to take a look at Barbara Mariconda's The Most Wonderful Writing Lessons Ever. It's for grades 2-4, and is a slim volume costing only about $10, but packs a lot in.

.

That may well be the sort of thing we are looking for! I can probably even afford that and the postage! Haha! I keep telling my sister that homeschoolers are the best ;)

 

 

:hurray:

Rosie