2-Week Creative Writing Unit - Steps to Produce Quality Work

A two-week creative writing unit for middle school and early high school students designed to get the student past the "writer's block" of starting the first paragraph by: providing topics or scenarios to choose from; including poorly written samples to rewrite by identifying and correcting errors; and providing short selections with specific directions on ways to "fluff out" and improve the passage.

In addition to supplying students with ideas and topics to help them get started writing creatively; this unit provides students with the background information and analysis needed to enable students to understand the parameters of quality creative writing and develop skills to improve their writing ability.

Although each of the thirty assignments in this unit can stand alone, the creative writing unit is designed as a two-week course in which each day has three assignments. The first assignment is short, designed to analyze parts of speech and give students practice with writing longer sentences. The second assignment is designed for class analysis and discussion (with moderate written work) incorporating multiple examples that allow a significant number of students to participate. The third portion is a writing assignment that builds on the class discussion assignment, that can be started in class and finished for homework.

Steps to Produce Quality Work includes: how descriptive words and prepositional phrases create flow/rhythm and clarity; how to weave together descriptions, dialogue and action; how to integrate character's visual appearance and ideals into the dialogue and action; and how including references to the five senses can make passages "come alive" for the reader.

Five assignments in this creative writing unit include passages from the book "The Tail of a Witch's Broom" which can be downloaded from the Phonics Advantage store on the Teachers Pay Teachers website.