Can students create a short mystery? A myth? With these lessons, they can!

Last week I wrote about some short grammar and writing tools you could use if you are teaching an Elective this term and your students need to review skills.  You can read about it here.

Let's talk about longer writing projects today, though. I found that there was little time for students to write in my classes except for text-dependent analysis.  Which they didn't love.  I wondered if they would complain less about that if they were given the chance to do narrative writing, something more of them enjoyed.

One year, in my WIN (What I Need) elective, my students wrote mysteries.  I created some timelines that we could use to figure out the details of the plot.  I think mysteries are a bit more challenging to write because you need to figure out where you're going to place hints, where a character gets introduced, where you learn something new, and where you're going to place red herrings.

This project was a lot of fun!  I was touched by how often students turned to each other to help them make sense of their writing, when they got stuck.  One student even kept working on her mystery long after the school year ended, periodically sending me updates to comment on. ❤️❤️

Another year I had all of my students write Creation Myths.  Those are the ones that tell how something in nature came to be - and did they ever come up with some fun ones!

• Why the wind is silent
• Why thunder is noisy
• Where lightning came from
• Why trees put their roots in the ground

In those days, we had a MakerSpace in the media center, so once our stories were nearly finished, we spent a few days there making either the setting or the protagonist.  But you could have students bring in and share supplies and do that in your classroom.

Both of these helped students get more invested in writing.  Once they realized they were enjoying writing, it sure made that text-dependent analysis writing much more palatable.

👉👉Want to try one of these?  Just click on the pictures to take a closer look.