Creative writing is one of the most crucial, albeit overlooked activities in Singapore’s early schools. Over the years, creativity has gradually fallen to the wayside in schools. Luckily, enrichment classes for toddlers work to change this by focusing on creativity and individual development.
Research shows creative writing offers kids a lot of benefits both mental and physical. When children imaginatively express ideas and thoughts, they develop organizational abilities, emotional skills, and improve their intellectual skills. This also builds their confidence and most importantly, develops self-expression skills.
Kids who are well-versed in writing become better communicators as they hone communication and persuasion skills through the pen. Enrichment classes in Singapore develop kids’ confidence through creative writing. This also boosts their communication skills and critical thinking skills.
As a child experiences the world, they encounter many new things. As a teacher or parent, you should help them develop the skills to express such stuff in writing. Teaching and guiding creativity isn’t easy, especially with kids who are not able to express themselves.
This post looks at innovative ways to encourage expressiveness in your class and boost creative writing.
Writing Prompts to Practice
Writing prompts are one of the most effective techniques to jumpstart creativity. If you have ever tried writing, you appreciate how frustrating writers’ block can get. For a kid, this can ruin the whole writing experience and make a child fear the activity. To avoid this and to boost expressiveness, it’s advisable to use writing prompts.
Writing prompts are a smart teaching technique in any creative writing class. This strategy stimulates a child’s imagination and unlocks the plot or storyline. Children love stories, and when they have a prompt to start them off, it becomes easy to get going.
Examples of writing prompts are:
- Describe your weekend
- Who’s your favourite teacher?
- Describe your favourite cartoon character?
Take time to brainstorm around a few of such prompts with your students to help them choose the perfect one. This guarantees a creative story from the child and you’ll love reading it.
Visual prompts can also help spur creativity. You can get pictures from magazines or from the internet and encourage students to write about the images. As they enjoy looking at the displays, encourage the students to write whatever words or feelings that come to mind.
Encourage Journal Writing
Journal writing is one of the earliest writing encounters the best writers in the world had. With a journal, a child can creatively retell their day’s activities. It also gives them a boost of confidence as no one has to check whatever they write.
With time, your students will proudly share their journal entries as they start loving the experience. Encourage free writing in journals, and don’t worry about grammar and language. The idea is to bolster creativity and help children express what’s in their minds and around them.
When you allow the kids to express them freely, you also motivate them to become more observant. This, in turn, enriches their writing.
Start with the Characters
For a child, developing a coherent plot or storyline can be tough. You can make things easier if you start with characterization. For instance, kids love superheroes. Instead of telling them to write what they think superheroes should do, start by telling them to list all characters in their favorite superhero cartoon or movie.
After listing the characters, ask them to write what each character does beside their names. You can use prompts such as “what are their superpowers?” “What does this character do?” “who do you think will win?”
In this simple way, you will encourage your students to string together ideas from each character into a creative story. The same strategy works for any other type of story a child might want to write. Encourage your students to think of the characters first, their traits, motivations, physical features, background, and other such aspects.
Teach Effective Description
A good story always has great details that make it easy to follow and interesting. The best teachers of enrichment classes in Singapore make descriptions of the core of their students’ writing. Tell the kids to ask probing questions like “what?” “how?” and “when?” to get material for their creative writing.
For instance, when describing a superhero, encourage the writer to ask, “What does my superhero do?” “How does my character look?” Feeling words can also help flesh out these characters and give more flair to the stories. For instance, ask the writers to describe how their characters feel.
Allow your students’ imagination to flow even if much of their descriptions will not match reality. This is the beauty of creative writing.
Create a Writing Environment
The best classes for toddlers in Singapore inspire creativity through a fun and playful setting. If you want to encourage creativity in your students, create a setting that helps build new ideas in their minds.
You can use posters of cartoons, superheroes, charts, images of animals, present TV shows in class, photos of beautiful landscapes or pictures of popular child movie characters. The idea is to generate new ideas and thoughts in the students’ brains.
Wrapping Up
There you have it; teaching creative writing doesn’t have to be so hard after all. With these innovative ideas, you can start molding young writers from an early age.
