The Writing’s on the Wall

Subject: Writing with focus on narrative, understanding conflict and resolution.
Entry Point: Group students into teams of 3 or 4. Ask them to come up with the most interesting eccentric person on their list of loved ones from their writers notebook.

Experiment: Ask student groups to create overhead characters based on their family members. They are then to use these characters to create a narrative revolving around a conflict. Each student group will randomly choose a “setting” and a “conflict” prepared ahead of time by the teacher and write out dialogue for their characters. Groups will create a short story that they can perform on the overhead.

Extension/Resources: Student groups can write their stories on charts. Dialogue can be written on post-it paper and put on the wall in order to organize story lines, conflict and resolution.