Pizzaz! Creative Writing and Storytelling Ideas
This site is run an ESL instructor at the University of Orgeon. It contains a collection of poetry, fiction, and miscellaneous ideas for writing activities. Though the explanations may be geared toward instructors working in ESL settings, most of the activities could also be used in other community settings, particularly with kids.
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Thanks for posting this! I taught a short story camp this summer for middle schoolers and a funny thing happened with diamante poems. Towards the end of camp, we were revising stories, reading each other's work, compiling portfolios, making covers, and preparing for a reading. One boy was a fast writer and kept adding more and more short pieces to his portfolio. But one day he came to me and asked me if he could write a diamante.
ReplyDeleteI'd completely forgotten the word from when I wrote them in middle school. I hadn't brought any poetry into the course because 1) the camp's title was The Short Story, and 2) I had assumed kids would resist it. So of course I said he could write one. He wrote two--one was extremely silly (I think it had tacos as one of the words!) and the other was more serious, almost spiritual, with, if I remember correctly, the sky and the sea on either end.
And then ALL the kids were writing poems. They wrote diamantes but also wrote free verse. I was stunned and thrilled.