Mentor Monday #2: Writing Scary Stories

15/6/2019

I work as a high school teacher and teach across four subject areas: English, English as an Additional Language, Humanities and Creative Writing. I have been teaching for six years and each year is getting easier, mostly because I have now taught across all year levels 7-10 and subject areas and have created resources to support my teaching.

In the first five years of teaching more than 50% of teachers leave the teaching profession. I came dangerously close to becoming a part of this statistic after numerous burn outs throughout my first four years. I want to do something to change this and so every Monday I will be a mentor by sharing my teaching resources and classroom tips.

Creating resources is where I get to put to use my creativity and my writing background and I want them to have a larger audience. Feel free to share, use and adapt my resources.

Writing Scary Stories

I love teaching creative writing. It's my happy place and it's where all my skills as an author come into play. I developed the following unit for my year 9 EAL class and it worked a treat to get them to write an effective scary story.

I embedded grammar skills within the unit in order to get them to learn application in relation to their stories.

The way I teach creative writing is to break each section into seperate sections so first they develop a character and setting in order to write an orientation. Then they write the climax of the story and then resolution. I provide scaffolds for each stage of the writing process and this is their draft as I go through and provide feedback. Then they put their final stories together with all the elements.

Learning Intentions: