Building Critical Thinking Skills While Writing
I have this fear that writing for fun is being stripped from the classroom. It’s getting this bad reputation of not being purposeful.
So, do y’all mind if I step onto my soapbox for a hot minute? Thank you so much.
Creative writing builds critical thinking skills. A creative writing assignment asks students to completely invent a story from their own minds. That along is a skill that we want people to have. It’s art, and we need it.
But, on top of the creativity and imagination involved, when you’re writing a story, you have to make everything fit. The characters’ actions have to make sense for the way you have developed them so far, for the setting, for their relationships with other characters. The plot has to develop in a way that make sense-it can’t be too rushed. It’s can’t be too easy. It needs to take time and come to a resolution nicely and neatly by the end.
Guys. This is really hard. And yet we keep taking away journaling and creative writing prompts for things like personal narratives or how-to essays.
I’m not saying those genres are bad. I’m just saying they are less complicated. It’s not nearly as difficult to write a story about something that actually happened to you, or to write out the steps of how to do something you know how to do.
What I AM saying is those genres of writing have taken precedence because they are on the test. And boo to that all day long.
One easy, rigorous, highly-effective way of working these critical thinking skills into your daily routine is to add creative writing assignments to your center areas. My Build-A-Story series can get realllyyyy complex if you want to make it that way, but it is also highly structured so kids can follow it independently, no matter their writing levels.
Differentiated graphic organizers allow students to spin to choose up to four different characters, settings, and seasonal objects that must be worked into their stories. You can simplify this by giving students planning pages that only allow for up to two of each story element, or one of each. Having up to four of each can make a very complex task for high-achieving students. How can they write a spring-themed story about a boy, a leprechaun, and a bumble bee at an airport? It’s up to them!
Story planning pages ask students to further develop their characters and setting, as well as thinking through the problem that will be evident in their stories.
You can have these stories simply stay in writing notebooks or have students publish them on writing paper with page toppers (all provided). This can make beautiful work for the hallway, or a long-term assignment that keeps getting built on in writing notebooks.
