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:

To decide on a point of view for my scary story
To decide which tense to use when writing my scary story
To use the STEAL method to develop characterisation
To incorporate symbolism in my scary story
To create a setting for my scary story
To write an orientation to my scary story
Orientation scaffold-use this to plan and write your orientation
to identify the types of sentences used in the climax of a story
To incorporate the features of Horror Writing in my scary story
To write the climax of my story using the features of horror
Climax scaffold-use this to plan and write your climax
Learning Intention: To write the resolution to my story
Resolution scaffold-use this to plan and write your resolution
Scary Stories Critique Sheet
To write a scary story orientation paragraph as a Common Formative Task
To write a scary short story for Summative Assessment Task

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