Creative Writing Lesson Plan: Once Upon a Time Writing Prompt

Creative writing teachers spend much time looking for ways to inspire their students and give them tools to come up with ideas. Using the traditional framework of the fairy tale, students learn how to structure a story.

To introduce this series of activities, start by reading some fairy tales and folk tales aloud. Pitara is a good online source for stories with fairy tale structure. Greek myths and even some bible tales work well, as do many traditional African tales. There is a wide variety of children's literature and folklore from around the world if one is willing to visit libraries and bookstores.

Choose tales to read aloud with your class.

Discuss the structure that is present in all of these stories:

• "Good" characters (protagonists)
  
• "Bad" characters (antagonists)
• Problems
• Solutions
• Ending
• Moral?

Give students a chart or diagram with six sections to fill out. Each section is for one of the above bulleted categories. As a class or individually, instruct students to fill in the chart for one of the stories read together in class. For example, for The Three Little Pigs:

• "Good" characters (protagonists): The Three LIttle Pigs
  
• "Bad" characters (antagonists): The Big Bad Wolf
  
• Problems: The Wolf is trying to eat the Pigs.
  
• Solutions: The third little Pig builds brick house and lets his brothers in.
  
• Ending: The Pigs chase away the Wolf and live in the brick house.
  
• Moral?(this is subjective): Build a strong foundation.
  

Now its time for students to write their own tales. Give them more diagrams to fill in with their own characters and story ideas.

Give each student a "title page" to print the title of his or her story on, and to illustrate.

The last step is for the students to write out their stories in paragraph form. The whole packet should be handed in so the teacher can chart progress.

Let volunteers read their stories aloud to the class.

It may be appropriate to organize the students reading their stories to younger classes; for example, fourth graders visit and read their fairy tales to first graders.