creative writing lesson ideas ks3

• Primary Hub
• Art & Design
• Design & Technology
• Health & Wellbeing
• Secondary Hub
• Citizenship
• Primary CPD
• Secondary CPD
• Book Awards
• All Products
• Primary Products
• Secondary Products
• School Trips
• Trip Directory
• Trips by Subject
• Trips by Type
• Trips by Region
• Submit a Trip Venue

Trending stories

Top results

• Teaching Resources
• Picture Perfect Lesson Plan For Ks3 English

Creative writing KS3 – Images & sticky notes lesson plan

PDF lesson plan

This creative writing KS3 lesson uses inspiring images and sticky notes to get learners producing some truly creative writing.

Often students will say ‘I don’t know what to write’. The format of this lesson eradicates that barrier to learning and creativity. Use it to teach this important skill to students of all abilities (including your mixed-ability groups).

The collaborative nature of this lesson (students read what the person before them has written) means they learn from and inspire each other.

It’s a kinesthetic creative writing KS3 lesson. Students move around using a range of resources. The strict timing element means it’s extremely fast-paced.

While getting students moving around the classroom (especially in classes where behaviour is challenging ) can be daunting, the speed of the task keeps students focused. It results in students producing some fantastic work without too much teacher talk or instruction needed.

You do need some resources, but for all the coloured sticky notes required, it is well worth the effort.

You can adapt this lesson to other subjects. This idea can even be a revision tool, where the pictures you pass around represent different topics students have already studied.

Noga Verber has taught English and drama at Chestnut Grove Academy in South London for three years. She is also a head of house and the director of the school musical. Browse more free KS3 English reading and writing lesson plans.

Similar resources

• KS3 poetry – Identify poetic techniques in song lyrics
• Form time ideas – Literacy and numeracy activities for KS3 & KS4
• Prompts for creative writing – Fun ideas for all ages
• Unseen poetry GCSE – Analyse Firework by Katy Perry
• Reading comprehension PDF – KS3/4 differentiated tattoos activity

Sign up to our newsletter

You'll also receive regular updates from Teachwire with free lesson plans, great new teaching ideas, offers and more. (You can unsubscribe at any time.)

Which sectors are you interested in?

Early Years

Thank you for signing up to our emails!

Explore teaching packs

Why join Teachwire?

Get what you need to become a better teacher with unlimited access to exclusive free classroom resources and expert CPD downloads.

Exclusive classroom resource downloads

Free worksheets and lesson plans

CPD downloads, written by experts

Resource packs to supercharge your planning

Special web-only magazine editions

Educational podcasts & resources

Access to free literacy webinars

Newsletters and offers

Create free account

By signing up you agree to our terms and conditions and privacy policy .

Already have an account? Log in here

Thanks, you're almost there

To help us show you teaching resources, downloads and more you’ll love, complete your profile below.

Welcome to Teachwire!

Set up your account.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. Commodi nulla quos inventore beatae tenetur.

I would like to receive regular updates from Teachwire with free lesson plans, great new teaching ideas, offers and more. (You can unsubscribe at any time.)

Log in to Teachwire

Not registered with Teachwire? Sign up for free

Reset Password

Remembered your password? Login here

• Teach Early Years
• Teach Primary
• Teach Secondary
• Advertise With Us

• New for Schools
• Browse by subject
• Maths & Science
• English & MFL
• Outdoor Learning
• Product Focus
• Resource Guide

Lesson Plan: KS3 English, creative writing

• Subject: English and MFL
• Date Posted: 12 March 2013
• View page as PDF: Download Now

Share this:

​Providing the right atmosphere can encourage students to take their creative writing to a whole new level, says Claire Sheffield…

​Providing the right atmosphere can encourage students to take their creative writing to a whole new level, says Claire Sheffield…

Today you will….

• Develop the ability to use your imagination to create a story in the gothic genre
• Learn to use ambitious vocabulary to achieve specific effects

Starting a piece of creative writing can be a source of frustration for many young people; so much so that it can lead to loss of confidence. If ideas aren’t flowing, learners can quickly switch off and give up. Creative writing lessons, therefore, need to stimulate all of the senses and inspire students. Creative writing in the gothic genre – spooky stories – offers a wonderful opportunity for just this. This is a topic that always manages to enthuse pupils and one of the most exciting aspects is that the outcome is completely different with every group. Giving students time for thinking and the creation of ideas is essential. Therefore, this plan should be seen as just a starting point; it provides the stimulus from which a number of sessions can be developed. Subsequent periods can also focus on the development of different writing skills as required by the individual needs of a group. As a way into creative writing, this opener allows learners to be independent; an environment that enables them to thrive. Most importantly, it’s a lesson that students always leave talking about!

Starter activity

Creating a spooky word wall.

Preparation is key to this lesson. For maximum impact, everything needs to be ready so that students enter the room and immediately feel a mysterious atmosphere. This can be created by closing blinds, turning off the lights, playing spooky music and displaying an image on the whiteboard of an old, decrepit, haunted-looking house (easily sourced from the internet). It is great to see students entering the room and looking around confused, wondering what is happening and therefore immediately engaged!

Ideally learners need to be seated in small table groups; this should be a buzzy lesson with lots of group discussion and sharing of ideas. As they take their seats they see on their table a map/floor plan of a house with a cross in one of the rooms; it’s one of the rooms from the house displayed on the board. This can be easily created in a word document using text boxes to create the floor plan and labelling each room. The idea is that each table will focus on a different room.

On each table an instruction card for the starter activity is also displayed. This should say something along the lines of: ‘As a group create a word wall of spooky words to describe the room you are in. Be as ambitious as possible! You have 5 minutes’. This could be completed on A3 paper or on post-it notes to stick up on the wall next to them; students will then have created their own bank of vocabulary that will help them in later parts of the lesson.

Main activities

1 developing the plot.

This lesson works well if very little is said by the teacher to the whole class. This adds to the mysterious atmosphere because students have to read and find out what to do at different stages. The teacher very much facilitates the learning in this lesson, by circulating the room, supporting and stretching groups as appropriate.

As the 5 minutes for the starter activity draws to a close, the spooky background music should be turned off and a short, shocking sound should be played. This could be a scream or a crash, for example. As this point another slide should be displayed on the board to move students onto the next stage of the lesson. This could read: ‘What has happened? Write the opening for a spooky story about a mysterious incident that has happened in the room you are in. Discuss for 5 minutes.’ Students are now using their imaginations to create a plot for their gothic story; it is important that students are encouraged to discuss and develop ideas before beginning the writing stage.

2 Going further

After around five minutes discussion, another slide can be displayed which reads: ‘Look for a clue about what has happened. You will find this somewhere near you!’ Underneath each table, students will find an envelope with a picture of a clue. This could be anything (e.g. a book or a camera). Equally, props could be placed around the room for students to find. The more unusual the better! It just gets pupils thinking more creatively. They will naturally want to talk about what they have found and start to revise their previous thinking

3 Stage three

After a few moments, the final slide of instruction can be displayed. This time, students are told: ‘Time to start writing. You have 25 minutes to use the clues so far to write the opening to a spooky story. Remember your objectives – be imaginative and use ambitious vocabulary to achieve a spooky effect.’ Spooky background music can be played throughout the writing stage. It is also important that learners have access to a thesaurus in order to locate more ambitious vocabulary.

Home learning

The lesson can be used as a starting point and developed in a number of ways… + Subsequent lessons/home learning activities could focus on developing other writing skills such as structuring a plot from beginning to end, using literary devices or using a variety of sentence structures and punctuation for effect.

+ The written work could lead into a speaking and listening lesson where students devise, rehearse and perform dramatic readings of their stories. + Students can explore a variety of gothic literature, researching different writers in the genre, reading different works and learning about the conventions of the genre. They can then develop their work to incorporate more of these conventions themselves.

After the main writing stage of this lesson, students are usually desperate to read their work out. To be able to do this in a meaningful way though, more time is usually needed, so it is appropriate to dedicate the following lesson to this. However, an opportunity to share work with others can be achieved through groups swapping their work and providing some feedback to consider for the following lesson. Questions such as those below can help students to structure their feedback in a constructive manner:

• How imaginative is the piece?
• How exciting did you find the story?
• Is there anything that does not make sense?
• How ambitious is the vocabulary? Does it achieve the desired spooky effect?
• How would you like the group to improve the piece?
• What questions can you ask the group to help them develop the piece further?

The following lesson can then begin with students considering this feedback in order to improve the work they have begun in this lesson.

Differentiation suggestions to support less able students:

• Provide a word bank or sentence starter bank.
• Provide additional resources to inspire ideas; further images or props, for example.
• Provide a wagoll (what a good one looks like) as a model of a piece of spooky writing.
• Suggestions to stretch more able students:
• Provide definitions/examples of literary devices and a challenge card asking students to ‘aim to include as many literary devices as possible.’
• Ask students to work towards a third learning objective: ‘use a variety of sentence structures for effect’ or ‘use a variety of punctuation for effect.’
• Allocate an expert to mixed ability groups who is asked to fulfil additional responsibilities as group leader.
• Provide a ‘challenging criteria’ card as a checklist of skills that more able students should aim to demonstrate.

You may also be interested in...

• Strictly 1000 Words winners chosen after enthralling live finals
• 1000 Word Challenge surpasses 10,000 learners
• CHOOSE KIND

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy & Cookies Policy.

Recommended for you...

How games-based learning can save teachers from marking hell

How to get parents engaged with their child’s computing studies

Lesson plan: KS3/4 MFL – teach grammar with cake

English and MFL

Lesson plan: KS3 English – improve creative writing… with zombies

Browse by Secondary Subject

Creative Writing: Narrative structure

Switch to our new english teaching resources.

Slide decks, worksheets, quizzes and lesson planning guidance designed for your classroom.

Lesson details

Key learning points.

• In this lesson, we will be thinking about the narrative structure of short stories. We will learn all about Freytag's 'narrative pyramid' and the hooks writers use to engage their readers.

This content is made available by Oak National Academy Limited and its partners and licensed under Oak’s terms & conditions (Collection 1), except where otherwise stated.

Starter quiz

5 questions, 7 questions.

Microsoft 365 Life Hacks > Writing > 5 writing exercises you should try to improve your creativity

5 writing exercises you should try to improve your creativity

As we continue to develop our writing skills, occasionally we need to reacquaint ourselves with a creative boost. That’s where these five creative writing exercises can come in: they are designed to loosen up the blocks that might get in the way of our creative process. See what you can do to overcome the fear of the blank page with these fun ideas for getting the creative juices flowing.

What are creative writing exercises?

Sometimes, we can be stymied by our writing process: it is easy to fall into the all-or-nothing mentality that demands that we write a masterpiece right from the start. That’s why a creative writing exercise is a useful tool. They’re meant for writers to brainstorm and ideate potential new ideas for projects. Whether the ideas and words that we generate lead to something publishable is not the end goal: instead, they’re meant to provoke the improvisational skills that can lead to fun new ideas.

Get the most out of your documents with Word

Elevate your writing and collaborate with others - anywhere, anytime

Creative exercises to improve writing skills

Here are some ways to begin putting pen to paper:

Freewriting

Freewriting is the easiest creative writing exercise that can help with creative blocks. Simply write down anything that comes to your mind, without any attention paid to structure, form, or even grammar and spelling mistakes.

For example, if you’re working from a coffee shop, write based on what you notice around you: the potent smell of the barista’s latest batch of coffee… the furrowed eyebrows of the local students hard at work on their assignments.

Or, if you’re in your home office , perhaps you can observe the light that pours from your window in the morning hours as you start your 9 to 5. Or reminisce about the dusty, ill-used pens and paper clips sitting in the back of your desk drawer.

Do this for 10-15 minutes per session, uninterrupted: the Pomodoro technique can help with this.

Story starter prompts

Use an otherwise mundane phrase or sentence to kickstart a writing session and create a short story or character description. Try these sentences as story starters:

• The old man had a look of frustration.
• It felt like my husband had woken up angry.
• “Open a window,” Lucinda said, “it’s mighty hot in here.”

Letter to your younger self

This exercise asks the question: what would you say to your teenage self? Or a version of you 5, 10, or 20 years younger? In this exercise, you can recast your life in a different light and offer advice, reassurance, or reexperience a special moment again. Maybe you can write from a perspective of optimism: now that you are successful, for example, you can be excited to share your accomplishments. This highly personal exercise can help you tap into all manners of emotions that can then go into character development.

Take two characters from your work, or a book that you love and rewrite their experiences and plot points while switching their points of view. Perhaps one character knows something more than the other, or another character’s perspective and thoughts have been unwritten. Switching these POVs can help you see how a storyline shifts, taking on different tones and emotional beats.

Flash fiction

Flash fiction is a type of short fiction that is 500 words or less. The objective of this exercise is to craft a narrative or a character portrait all within a highly limited constraint. Flash fiction differs from freewriting in that you write with focus, aiming towards a fully-formed story that can include plot, conflict, and a character portrait. Writing flash fiction seems deceptively easy, but it can be a challenge—which is why literary magazines and writing contests often have opportunities to publish and award great flash fiction.

If you’re looking for more ways to tap into your creativity, check out more writing tips here .

Get started with Microsoft 365

It’s the Office you know, plus the tools to help you work better together, so you can get more done—anytime, anywhere.

Topics in this article

More articles like this one.

When to use 'while' vs. 'whilst'

“While” and “whilst” are usually interchangeable, but not always. See how they differ and learn how to use them effectively.

What is touch typing (and why is it important)?

Learn about the benefits of touch typing and how it can help you type faster and more accurately.

Is it “per say” or ‘per se’?

Address the misspelling of ‘per se’ to effectively communicate the intrinsic quality of something. Learn why it is commonly misspelled and how to use it correctly in your writing.

Elicit vs. illicit: What’s the difference?

Learn the difference between illicit vs. elicit, two homophones that sound alike but mean different things, and write without confusion.

Everything you need to achieve more in less time

Get powerful productivity and security apps with Microsoft 365

Explore Other Categories

• International
• Education Jobs
• Schools directory
• Resources Education Jobs Schools directory News Search

ks3 Creative writing lesson

Subject: English

Age range: 7-11

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

27 September 2022

• Share through email
• Share through twitter
• Share through linkedin
• Share through facebook
• Share through pinterest

A fun and simple lesson to get your KS3 Pupils into their creative zone

Creative Commons "Sharealike"

Your rating is required to reflect your happiness.

It's good to leave some feedback.

Something went wrong, please try again later.

This resource hasn't been reviewed yet

To ensure quality for our reviews, only customers who have downloaded this resource can review it

Report this resource to let us know if it violates our terms and conditions. Our customer service team will review your report and will be in touch.

Not quite what you were looking for? Search by keyword to find the right resource:

Resources you can trust

Imaginative writing: creating a scene

This resource guides students through an imaginative writing task, using the idea of two characters who get into trouble. The students make a series of initial decisions about the setting, narrative perspective and character. Then they follow a series of steps to support them in structuring their scene. Could work as a KS3 or a GCSE task.

The imaginative writing task:

• This task will help you to construct an effective narrative scene which ‘zooms in’ on the key part of a story to give it pace, tension and atmosphere.
• Your story is going to be about two people getting into trouble. This could be a simple physical problem, like being stuck down a hole, or more complex like getting a message from a friend with bad news.

All reviews

Have you used this resource?

Martin Wallace

balbir shibber

Sheree Campbell

Resources you might like