Here is our phonics student, C, making a video of the 'or' words he is learning. Student C is 6 and he has been picking up pronunciation and growing a love for stories and reading. He chose the bunny and words. He also decided what to say in each part, with some help from Teacher Libing. Thank you, C, for trying out this activity!
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Do your children or students write only short sentences when asked to describe? If the learner has difficulty writing more details, we can help the learner to practise description by using videos.

As moving visuals, videos are rich in action details. The learner can watch the video as many times as needed, and use the slow down function to catch the characters’ actions. Then a description can be made frame by frame. The learner also has enough time to review each section of the video while choosing appropriate words and phrases. Instead of relying on the learner’s imagination or recollection, this method works well for beginners and for revision.
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Why do we encourage our children and students to read? The wealth of knowledge in reading is simply too rich to be overstated. In this lesson, we used three books to help the student learn how to begin a story. While the books look like easy reads, the student had to think carefully about how the author chose to start the story. Did all the characters appear at the beginning? What was the setting? Which words did the author choose to attract the reader’s attention? Why was a question used instead of a statement? Other than reading more, as a teacher I take the student further into careful consideration of the impact of the author’s choice. This is vital in every creative writing course, especially for the upper primary and secondary school student-writers.
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Working with children or students who say they "get a headache" from reading more than one paragraph?

For a start, these learners need help before they begin reading long texts. This year I'm working with a teenager who doesn't resist learning, but whose stamina disappears once he sees a text more than half a page. We always do pre-reading activities to let him warm up to the text. In this lesson, he did a mini research task on Jane Goodall, which was the focus of the Comprehension text. Having talked about the topic and completed research, he was more mentally prepared to plough through the text later on. This pre-reading activity didn't take more than 15 minutes.

As a teacher, I fully acknowledge that this kind of warm up is not possible under examination conditions. However, if students have a chance to warm up properly during practice sessions, the fear of reading longer texts can be dealt with. The general knowledge acquired over these practices also gets better retained, as these are learned under pleasant conditions. Teen learners can learn to reframe reading as a manageable task, instead of seeing it as a chore.
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Creative Writing for Kids 7-10
Storytelling with Pictures
Theme 2 How We Act
2023 March 16
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Theme 2 of our writing workshop was just as interesting. The students warmed up really quickly to one another while making stories with picture cards. This was an oral communication activity and we learned to respect the ideas of every participant, no matter how weird we might think the story would go. When asked to imagine what animal you would like to be for a day and how the animal would behave, you showed that your desires laid in the animals' unique characteristics and abilities.

The story we used for today's session was There's A Snake in my School! What kind of unexpected happenings would occur? How did each animal and human character behave? There was a good deal of laughter and some sharp observations of the story in print.

Students tried to come up with their versions of There's a ___ in ___. To encourage young writers to express themselves in words, availability of choices and an open mind from the teacher/facilitator are important. Withhold judgement and get the young writers to explain their concepts. Ask them questions to spur thinking, instead of saying immediately, "No, that's not logical."

We share the same message in all our writing workshops for the young ones - you don't need to be a perfect writer, you just need to be willing to try.

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