Mystery Writing

This was actually a Halloween activity but I was scrolling through all my photos just now and came across the pictures of this writing idea - and remembered how much fun it was.
Since I'm on half term break right now - and therefore in planning mode - I thought I'd plan another one of these fun exercises.

This year I'm teaching Language to Year 6 - different age group, different concepts but the same drill work it seems. Capitalization, punctuation, vocabulary, connectives, interesting openers...

Sometimes it's hard to make writing fun when there are so many rules.

Our Mystery Writing activity made things fun again.

Rule number 1:

Students had to work with a partner. Instant smiles - it took the pressure off for those who aren't such strong writers and provided the oral storytellers with a scribe.

I provided a story starter for each pair of writers - that I had glued onto their page in advance. We'd been working on settings so I made sure to write very descriptive setting openers :)

Rule number 2:

Students chose a mystery word and a mystery question out of the hat and glued them onto their sheet. (All words/phrases and questions written by me in advance and totally random. :) )

Some examples were:  "purple, furry spider" and "Who ate the blueberries?"

Rule number 3:

Somewhere in the story students had to include the mystery object (in its exact words) and the story had to ANSWER the mystery question. At the end, when they read the story to the class, everyone was supposed to be able to identify the mystery object and guess the mystery question.

Rule number 4:

The story had to be finished by the end of the lesson.

SO MUCH FUN!!

Instant engagement, hysterical giggles, heads together, frantic writing, more gales of laughter...

... and at the end of the lesson hands shooting up to be the first to read their stories!

We all loved it - and there was some fantastic writing!

I'm definitely going to do this again - or a variation of it. Perhaps partner/group writing of some sort. I've already got some ideas :)

The Teacher Studio has a Loved that Lesson link-up with lots of great ideas for lessons. Check it out.

Here's the link for  Loved that Lesson: February :)