Creative Writing Stimulus

(Cremin and Myhill, Writing Voices, 2012) Here is an example of one way that this could be visualised.Once the inital ideas are drawn on the page, encourage scribbled words or phrases that children have thought about.

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Opportunities to discuss a range of doorway and portal extracts, to discuss their language, features and forms, to identify particularly effective writing techniques and to imitate these can help young writers understand how to construct and develop their own ideas and writing.

Here’s a list of ideas of great texts that include portals or doors, which I gathered with help from teachers on Twitter: Using text exemplars, modelling writing and demonstrating different features is really valuable, but don’t be tempted to overuse these teaching strategies.

Whilst I have previously used ‘fairy doors’ on trees with younger years, I wanted something else for UKS2.

Something that would spark their imaginations with limitless possibilities…

That way, they can start to see patterns and links, which in turn generates more ideas.” (Pie Corbett, Jumpstart!

Literacy, 2006) Before you ask the children to mind map their initial ideas, perhaps do a whole-class example and model this on the flipchart/whiteboard to show them how it’s done.

We want to give them freedom and the power to take their story wherever they want to.

Finally, once plenty of time has been allowed for idea generation, discussion, reading and visualisation, allow sufficient time for children to draft, revise, edit and publish their stories.

Objects and Visual Stimulus I began by looking for visual stimulus online and came across a wide range of excellent visuals, particularly on Pobble 365 (try Doors, The Tree Door, Opening Doors, The Mysterious Door and The Tomb for starters! I also found an excellent website called The Secret Door, whereby children can click on the door to reveal different settings and unusual places.

For children struggling to come up with an idea for a fantasy world, they could use this to stimulate ideas further.