English - Creative Writing

I wrote an essay for homeschool the other day.   The subject was Sports Day - which I had just attended.  

It was 2 fold exercise.  First a factual account.  Then a creative one with juicy bits from my imagination added in to make it a mini story that was more interesting to read than the actual event.  It was fun.

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This is how we planned the essay:

Review of essays:  Beginning, middle conclusion.

Start with a word bank.  Then chose and interesting beginning.   Use paragraphs and write a bit about the sequence of events using each word in the word bank.

You can write a rough version and re-read to see where you need to add bits in etc or change bits.  Then write out in neat.

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I am excited to say that I find my writing has improved.  This was really good for my self confidence.

Near the beginning of last year the teacher at the school suddenly told us to write 200 words.

It was soooo difficult.  We weren't shown what to do just told to do it.  She told me mine was bad, not good enough - in front of the whole class.  I had been ill and off school and had concussion. I had no background notes to learn about essay writing and had not done it before in her class - over that school year.  The whole time I was off school, my mum had been asking that teacher for the work I had missed but she gave us a couple of pages on one of the days.  Thats all the whole time I was off.    Defo. nothing about essays.

She said that she did not like my writing.  I used unusual names for people and she insisted I use local traditional names etc.  So whats creative if its not allowed to be your imagination.

On top of that, at the beginning of class I told her I felt really unwell.  I had a horrific headache which I had the whole time I had concussion.  She forced me to stay in class and refused to call my mum.  Then about an hour later, just out of the blue it was announced that we were doing our maths and english SATS.  We did the maths ones and then straight onto english with a 200 word essay.  It was awful timing without any teaching on the subject and work never being marked.

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So last week for homeschool we re-looked  at factual and creative writing.  I have done a lot of it over the past year and with all my blogs and projects my writing has improved.

So I started my story of Sports Day and without realising wrote 5 pages.  WOW!  It was so easy :)

My mum was really impressed and I am finding it much easier to write a lot in one go.

I am just busy putting it onto my scribd.com account and then I will post it here.

We put it onto MS Word and its over 1000 words :)  So much for 200 words a year ago.

Just goes to show - if you are actually taught and given quality notes and time and guidance to practice your skills then you can really do something.

Instead of being put on the spot at that SCHOOL - with no warning or any teaching/notes - just because its time for your SATS! 

Exams should be to test you knowledge based on what you have been taught.  

Not throwing pupils into the deep-end without them being taught how to swim.  It was constant neglect in that class and then sudden pressure without warning.  Then strong criticism in front of the whole class to humiliate one.