creative writing games

creative writing games

Creative Writing Games

1. Introduction

The term “game” applies to anything that is done to challenge the youth’s mind and spirit. In this bundle of games, you will find a wide variety of activities to cover all aspects of writing. Mind mazes incite descriptive and imaginative language and are rather formidable to do. Dissertation squabble is a good test for juniors who have only just begun writing persuasively. This gives them some experience in the area before they have to use it to persuade someone else. Peer poetry is a hobby activity that is both fun and revealing of new ideas. This is perfect for a lesson following poetry composition. And think, pair, shares are good for the more opinion-based writing topics.

Are you looking for a way to build an exciting creative writing activity for your students? Would you like that word or skill work activity to incorporate writing? These games are designed to get students to look past their basic instincts and into creative worlds only they can illustrate. It incorporates the unanticipated and unexpected into their writing and produces promising and imaginative outcomes.

2. Benefits of Creative Writing Games

Teaching creative writing has proven to increase an individual’s emotional intelligence. By playing writing games, using interesting and thought-provoking prompts, students will work to express unique thoughts and emotions through writing. During this process, students will stop to reflect on their varying emotions which will allow self-awareness to take place. Self-awareness is a proven factor in emotional intelligence. In the article “Teaching ESL students emotional intelligence and the use of creative writing,” emotional intelligence and how it is taught through creative writing is discussed in depth by the author. He lists self-awareness and expression as key factors in emotional intelligence. This is further discussed by Daniel Goleman in his article “What makes a leader?” Goleman discusses the emotional competencies that a leader must have. The five competencies are: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill. All of which can be improved upon through learning creative writing and by use of creative writing games.

According to studies, creative writing for learning can offer countless benefits to individuals. When creative writing is taught with games, students are more likely to enjoy the learning process. Through utilizing writing games, creative writing can be a fun experience. The reason that creative writing can be an enjoyable experience is because it engages the student in the depth of their creativity and self-expression. When students are writing creatively, they are more likely to make the most of their creativity. Introducing creative writing games to students can be a fun and positive experience.

3. Popular Creative Writing Games

The objective of this project was to address the low level of attainment that the students had with their creative writing work and to help them develop skills essential to the GCSE syllabus. The study was accomplished with students from an all-male school from years 9 and 10. This was a very small group of only 10 students, whose behavior during usual lesson time suggests that they would not normally choose to do extra English work during their free time! Their low attainment level with English work is mirrored in the pupils’ perspectives; at its initiation, these students stated that they were not skilled writers and had difficulty with remembering how to write different types of stories and descriptions. A step up from dreadful adherence to the status quo was necessary, and thus the practitioner elected to approach their predicament with a bit of strategic off-topic bias, by allowing the pupils to engage in the form of simplified versions of popular television game shows.

Popular Creative Writing Games explores the mechanics, benefits, and successes of Afterschool Club, a three-week creativity project undertaken in one UK secondary school. This study focuses on the ways in which the practitioner created an effective learning culture to develop students’ creative writing skills through game-related activities. It investigates how these activities captivated the interest of the disaffected and how they learned about the process of creative writing through having fun. Data collected from pupils, alongside the practitioner’s own analysis evaluating the benefits of the games, facilitates a critical reflection aimed at modifying and continuing this successful approach to creative writing at Key Stage 3 and 4 level. This will be a field of research that is currently still in development.

4. How to Create Your Own Creative Writing Games

Draw on the games you have played and loved, the ones you didn’t like and why. Think about what makes a game work and how it could be applied to a creative writing game. Think about your children or students: what are their likes, dislikes, personality and character traits. Also consider their cognitive development and age as this will influence the types of games they enjoy and how these games can be used to develop creative writing. Below are some suggested steps to help you get started in creating your own games. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll find it hard to stop. The games and the joy of seeing young people motivated and engrossed in creative writing will be reward itself. These suggestions are quite linear and systematic. You might be able to adapt and play around, working jigsaw or hybrid-like from step to step, or fleshing out step 2 before you know exactly how step 1 looks and so on. Step 1 might be where you spend most of your brainstorming time. Don’t worry about sticking to the steps exactly as they are. You can easily move back and forth between them until ideas start to gel. Step 1: Come up with a basic game idea – This does not need to be complex. The game’s complexity can be developed or scaled down later. An example: A board game where players move about spaces trying to get to a treasure at the end. Spin the wheel or roll a dice to see how many moves you can make. If you land on a space with a pirate, you have to fight him for the right to continue, and if you lose, go back to the beginning. If you reach the treasure, you collect it and must successfully escape a chase of boulders down the mountain by answering questions to win and hang onto the treasure.

5. Conclusion

This book highlights the variety of ways in which creative writing can be turned into an appealing and enjoyable activity. Each recipe details the resources you will need, the preparation and some tips for running the exercise. Building on these simple and accessible exercises, the games seek to tangibly improve the individual’s writing ability. Each exercise states its specific aims and includes suggestions as to how to assess whether these have been achieved. This assessment can be done either privately or through peer assessment. Using the results of these assessments, individuals can map their own progress as a writer. Having now reached the end of the book, we hope that when staring at the blank page and blinking cursor, the content within this book will echo into your mind and that you will never again have to suffer the torture of writer’s block. We hope that you have learnt tools with which you can manipulate, shape and colour your writing and make it something to be proud of. We hope that this book has shown you that to improve your writing can be fun and is not necessarily a task to be done through turgid, laborious practice. And finally, we hope that armed with these new activities and approaches, you will continue to improve your ability. This book has targeted an audience of people who enjoy writing and want to improve; mainly focused at beginner to intermediate levels in both fiction and poetry. Teachers may also find these exercises useful in a classroom environment. This book has been successful if in reading, you have found it to be a refreshing and original approach to improving writing skills. So we wish you all the very best in improving and enjoying your writing and hope that this book has actually made a difference to the way you write.