Random categories leads to a very exciting creative writing class.

I was conducting a creative writing class with a mixed group of students. Some of the students were from the middle east, some fro Asian countries and almost everyone spoke a different language. Everyone spoke some level of English, but I had to help them complete a creative writing project.

Image taken from https://goo.gl/images/4EPzAx

This was my idea and my lesson plan:

Set induction/Energizer

I started with a game of Scattegories. For those who are unfamiliar with the game, this is how it works:

• Divide the class into groups of four.
• Each member has a role, you should have 1 writer, 2 thinkers (for ideas) and one runner.
• You will start by giving them a category and an letter. For example, category: Fruit. Letter: A
• Each group has 20 seconds to scribble down a song on a piece of paper, run up to the teacher and hand it to the teacher. Late submissions will not be considered.
• Marks will be given for all groups with correct answers. However, if any two or more groups have the same answer, none of them gets a mark. For example, if group A writes Apple but groups B, C, D wrote Apricot. Only group A is awarded points.

This is a really fun activity and its difficulty can be tweaked to fit the level of your students. The list of categories should include, A famous character, food, country, sports, an action and a movie. This is important for the next activity.

Personally I recommend not doing this longer than 15 minutes to ensure that the writing activity can be carried out. Normally, I would end my game early and start again at the end of the lesson as a reward for the class.

Brainstorming
The point of Scattergories was to help the students establish a list of ideas to use for the creation of a story later. With the categories established from the Energizer, the students can then orally combine all the categories together to form a story.

The story can be based on anything, as long as they use the categories to form a cool and funny story.

An example is this story is:

Writing task

In this section, the teacher can help the students expand their stories found earlier. This can be achieved through asking who, what, where, when, why and how questions.

The students will need to create at least 6 questions, for example:

• Who did Jackie Chan travel with?
• Why did he travel to Thailand?
• How did he fall on the cookie?

This is to help the students expand on their current work and create a longer story from it.

An example of a longer completed essay:

Conclusion
The lesson can be ended with another round of Scattergories or just a recap of the lesson. Make sure the concepts as well as new vocabulary are reinforced before the end of the lesson.

Some extra notes

This lesson can be applied not just on creative writing, this can be done as well on teaching certain concepts. How this can be done is by changing the categories in Scattergories to fit your lesson objectives. I hope this helps, I recycle this game every few months and the students are never bored because it is so much fun!

All the best and good luck in making writing fun again!

If you need a better idea of how to play Scattergories, the video below should give you an idea to play it better..