Tell-Me Creative Thinking and Writing Lesson Plan

OBJECTIVE

Children should be creatively storytelling through drawing and writing, daily, from 1st grade on. Help them learn that writing is part of the joyful creative process.

MATERIALS

Context-rich Pictures and Picture Sequences
Printer
Paper
Pencil or word processor

DIRECTIONS

To engage children, read to/with children, high quality stories daily.
Have the children retell and expand on parts of these stories.
Then progress to content rich single pictures where they tell the story to you, together you write a few sentences on paper or with a word processor, which the children copy the letters.
These are pictures they have never heard a story about.
Progress from single pictures to content rich picture-only books, so that every week they make a mini-book.
The stories should start out fiction and evolve into a 50-50 mix of fiction and non-fiction, and 50-50 mix of pictures both of you select and they make their-self.
They might not start out drawing context rich pictures, but will over time with experience.
Content rich pictures support multiple stories and allow the children to start analyzing the pictures and text, building critical thinking skills.
Use the same picture to generate different story lines (what ifs), and deeper reflection.
The non-fiction storybooks will eventually evolve into reports, but they will be an adventure, not a chore.
You can start at 3 years old, gradually progressing from occasional storytelling based on pictures to daily drawing and writing.
Try to make it so that whenever they draw/color they write at least 2-3 words about it, and whenever they write, a picture is involved.
This encourages deeper thought.

Advice

If you are not already doing it, get the children a spiral-bound wide-ruled notebook for their daily learning journal where they draw and write what they learned about that day and their feelings about it (joys, wonder, and struggles).
The back 1/3 of the notebook, fold over a piece of tape on the 1st page of the section, should be his "I can" statements and an illustration demonstrating he can (e.g. I can count to 3; 1 2 3 * ** ***). This builds their ownership of their learning and teaches them summary skills.
Date each page so you and later they can see their progression.

Tell-Me