Kiddipedia
Are you keen to spark creativity, encourage your kids to write and fill in time productively over the school holidays? Here, bestselling author Tristan Bancks shares five activities from his new Young Writers’StorySchool program. StorySchoolshares everything Bancks knows about writing in 24 fast-paced, funny videos for ages 9-13.These activities are designed to inspire even the most reluctant writer or reader.
I loved stories when I was a kid. I loved reading as well as devouring TV and movies – as many stories as I could, as fast as I could get them. I loved making my own movies with friends, too, and writing stories down in scrapbooks and illustrating them (badly), as well as making flick books. But I was an active kid. I loved sport. So, I’ve always wanted writing to be a contact sport, for it to be visual and aural and engaging, not purely passive. This was how StorySchool came about.
The 24 videos are in three key modules: Hatch – 8 videos for idea generation, Fly – 8 videos for writing and drafting and Soar – 8 videos for rewriting and advanced tools. Each step encourages kids to use pictures, video, music, maps and other transmedia tools to generate ideas, develop their stories and complete their projects.
Here are five activities that I’ve extracted from StorySchool to help inspire your kids in the holidays:
1) Anything Goes. Have a go at the Anything Goes writing blast below. (It’s on YouTube or you can find it with an activity sheet on the StorySchool site.) It’s a regular freewriting practice in which you write non-stop for five minutes. Don’t assess or judge what’s produced. The point of the Anything Goes concept is to foster creativity and to extend the imagination. Start off with the prompt ‘I remember…’ and encourage writers to jot down 10-15 memories.
2) Drawing Your Story. Ask your young writer to select an item or artefact from around the house that means something to them, and then ask them to draw that item. Talk about, or ask them to jot down, details of the object and why it’s special. Did they find it? Did they save up to buy it? Was it a gift from someone special? Miss Aston, the teacher in my book, Detention, does this activity with her students at the beginning of the book and it’s one that I love using in workshops.
3) An Important Artefact. Encourage the writer to use the artefact and the drawing as inspiration to write a short story. Set the timer for five or ten minutes and do a short writing blast to get the story started. The timed-writing approach is a key tool for both beginning and experienced writers. It creates focus and is short enough to be achievable. I often find that kids want more time after the initial blast, which is a quality problem to have.
4) Fake News. Gather some interesting news stories from newspapers or magazines (or do it digitally). Get them to cut out the items that interest them and keep them in a folder. If you’re completing the exercise online, collate their stories into a Google doc. Once they’ve settled on a few items of interest, ask them to choose one or two and write a story that’s inspired by these true events. News stories were a big inspiration for my books Two Wolves, The Fall and Detention. The best thing about this approach is that the fictional story will always have a thread of truth running through it.
5) Become a Casting Director. Suggest that the writer spends ten minutes looking online or in books for people they’d like to cast as the lead character in their story if it was made into a movie. They may have a favourite actor who would be perfect for it. Or a favourite musician who they think could take on the role. When they’ve decided on the casting for their lead character, ask them to complete a 5-10 minute writing blast, from the point of view of their character. If they love this exercise, encourage them to develop brief scripts for the other characters in their story. You can see a snippet of the StorySchool video for this exercise below.
Are you keen to spark creativity, encourage your kids to write and fill in time productively over the school holidays? Here, bestselling author Tristan Bancks shares five activities from his new Young Writers’ StorySchool program. StorySchool shares everything Bancks knows about writing in 24 fast-paced, funny videos for ages 9-13. These activities are designed to inspire even the most reluctant writer or reader.
If you’re looking for more writing inspiration for kids, you can find 2 – 4 minute videos for all of these activities and more at Young Writers’ StorySchool with worksheets and teaching notes for further ideas. The program is $99 for a one-year individual subscription (but, for readers of this post, as a school holiday special, you can use the discount code TB20 at checkout, prior to 31 January 2022, to receive 20% off the full-price annual subscription).
If you happen to be in NSW, you can use your Creative Kids vouchers before 31 December to get StorySchool for your young writer for free. Details on the site.
If you’re keen to nurture your child’s imagination and storytelling skills or supercharge their writing for 2022, this high-energy, active, outdoor, visual, aural, tech-infused writing adventure could be the answer. I hope they enjoy watching and creating as much as I enjoyed making it.
Happy writing!
Tristan Bancks is an Australian bestselling children’s and teen’s author, with a background in filmmaking and acting. He is also the creator of Young Writers StorySchool – An online, video writing workshop for the classroom to help teachers and home educators inspire kids 9 to 14 to write! To find out more head to https://www.
