I’ve started another series of after school writing workshops at my library, where children in grades 3 through 7 can come together to develop their creative writing skills in a fun, safe and supportive environment. This session is taking place virtually, so kids from all across the city can participate.
In this series we typically cover a different element of storytelling each week – for example, we might talk about character development one week, and plot and pacing another. Each of these elements could be broken down into their own multi-part series, but since this is a multi-age introductory program, we try to keep things as broad as possible, allowing children to focus on the areas that interest them the most.
We kicked things off with an exploration of setting – what a setting is, why the setting of a story matters, and how we can create effective and engaging settings that pull readers in and whisk them away.
A big part of our program was spent growing and expanding our descriptive vocabularies. We’re all guilty of using the same descriptors over and over again – how often have you called something “cool” or “great”, when you could have said it was “spectacular” or “momentous” or “fantastic”? Using different activities, we encouraged our young writers to use all their senses to describe different settings, and to explore a variety of adjectives and adverbs to create exciting mental imagery.
A fun activity we started off with was looking at book covers and trying to guess the settings of the stories based on the covers. For example, we looked at the cover of David A. Robertson’s The Barren Grounds and asked children to guess what they thought the setting of the story might be like. Was it a cold environment, or a hot environment? A jungle? A bustling city? Was it sometime in the past, or maybe the future? Was it our present day world, a fantasy world, or maybe another planet entirely? What might it sound like, if you were one of those characters on the cover? How might you feel? Could you smell anything? Taste anything?
I’ve written about one of my favourite setting-themed activities before on the blog – it’s so easy to put together, and is a good activity for younger children, who might appreciate the visual prompt. Children are provided with images of different settings, and encouraged to use their senses to describe what that setting might be like. For example, in the setting below, a person might see a bright blue sky and fluffy white clouds, feel rough sand slip through their fingers, and experience hot winds blowing sand into their eyes.
We also gave kids an opportunity to write about the setting of their real-life story by describing the environment they were in at that very moment, whether it was their bedroom, living room, kitchen, or wherever else they might be.
An hour goes by in a flash, and if I’d had more time, it might have been fun to work a bit on synonyms – brainstorming words we could use in place of commonly used descriptors. Instead of cold, could we brainstorm frigid, icy, freezing, subzero? Could we describe something big as being enormous, humongous, gigantic or colossal?
This was our first session, and as often happens, our participants were a bit hesitant to share their writing with their peers. Some kids did write in the chat, but others didn’t want to communicate with us in any format. Sometimes children get more comfortable sharing as a program goes along and they build familiarity with the group and with their facilitators. But some kids may never want to speak (or type) in front of the group or share their writing, and that’s absolutely OK. We want kids to be comfortable, feel safe, and have fun, and if that means quietly observing, that’s just fine.
Next week – character development!