Hylands Pedagogy

One of the joys of being an English teacher is the opportunities that it provides me with engaging and encouraging students’ creativity and story-telling.  My year 7 class have currently been writing extended horror fiction, based around ‘Ghostbusters’, haunted houses and the mystery of a missing person.  Whilst it has been enjoyable, watching and working with them as they develop and extend ideas, it has also proved problematic as they often lose their way through long narratives and have to revise and adapt to return to their original ideas.  In reflection, and despite the obvious enjoyment they are showing as they struggle with their ideas, we may as a class have bitten off more than we can chew and the outcome it that it has made me reflect on some of the more successful ‘shorter’ tasks that we have used across the year.

Extended writing is a great process in the English classroom, but can be troublesome in other subjects and I want to push the opportunity for students to respond creatively as often as possible.  To this end, I now find myself writing a micro-blog about micro-writing which I hope will provide different activities to be able to use in other subjects.

The task was to write an action story in 80
words or less.

 With literacy and SPaG forever moving up the ladder of school focus, the different ways that we can incorporate written responses that demand accuracy as well as content into our lessons across the curriculum is essential.  

‘Flash-fiction’ or ‘Micro-fiction’ first came to light for me when reading ‘Sawn-Off Tales’ by Dean Gaffney, and since then I have adapted it to various forms and purposes.

Try using:

Six word film plots: This was made popular on a passing internet fad – this simple compression of an entire narrative into only six words really challenges students to find the core message of a given narrative. My attempt would be the film (or even the historical events of) Titanic: ‘Dreams lost to tragic icy death’.

Tweet and Re-tweet:  Much like ‘Consequences’, students write the original tweet and the moving around the room have to respond in new and developing tweets.  This could be developed to show different responses to an event or even having students respond in character, and for higher level students, theorists or scientists.

Seven word biographies: Another fun genre focused writing activity. You can see the opportunities are endless in terms of historical, political, scientific, artistic figures – or even places! – allowing students to once again condense their knowledge to highlight key details. Here is my own example for Winston Churchill: 'Black dog and war held at bay'.

Seventeen word tales:  Though the number of words can obviously be adapted, the task relies on students’ abilities to select and summarise key events precisely to ensure that they hit the magic prescribed number.  For additional challenge, give students rules and structures, such as asking them to include four types of punctuation, key facts or images, etc.

Haiku poems: These compressed poems get students selecting vocabulary and organizing sentence structures with real precision and focus and the true aim is to bring together two juxtaposing ideas - a great way to encourage higher to contrast conflicting theories, beliefs or points of view.

Mobile phone number narratives: Get students to use their mobile phone numbers to create a structure for sentence lengths e.g. for the number seven they need to include a seven word sentence etc. It really concentrates their mind on crafting sentence structures.

They make great starter activities to focus on prior learning or plenaries to show understanding of the lesson’s key content.  Get your students writing!