Lesson Summary
This post provides video and other materials for teaching an introductory preassessment lesson that helps you gauge your gifted students’ storytelling and creative writing skills. This lesson is part of a 10-lesson Common Core-aligned unit on creative writing for gifted elementary and middle school students.
Do you have ideas that worked for preassessing creative writing skills?
Share with us below!
Lesson Content:
This lesson is a preassssment to help you decide how to develop your students’ storytelling skills. While the videos are pitched to gifted elementary and middle school students, the lesson structure and concepts can be adapted for younger or older students.
- Time: 90 minutes and homework time
- Supplies: three Duke TIP videos (required) and index cards (optional)
- Duke TIP CW We’re all Storytellers Preassessment Lesson Plan
Meet Scheherazade and Keita, Your Storytellers
Meet the Characters
Conflicts, Problems, and Obstacles
Want to dig around in the TIP Curriculum Vault to see all 10 lessons of Creative Writing: Adventures Through Time? Head here.
Want to discuss whys and ways for teaching creative writing on the regular? Check out Why Teach Creative Writing, Part 1 at The Craft of Curriculum.
I wish I had these videos when I sponsored a creative writing club of 7th graders after school. I was always trying to find nontraditional teaching materials to inspire their writing.
Thanks, Sally. One of the nontraditional elements of these videos (which are parts of a feature-length film) is that students are stopped to do critical thinking and predict plot paths. A teacher can use this to ask students, “What would you do? How would you solve the plot problem?” What’s shared here are the introductory videos. Later (Lessons 7 and 8 in particular in the TIP Curriculum Vault) allow students to take the characters’ situations and play out different paths and consequences.