It’s Easy and Fun To Write a Novel With Your Class
Explore the universe of novel writing with your students
Contents
· Kids are creative and capable of writing novels · Foolproof framework · The Amazing (Planet) Race · Gentle feedback and encouragement · Old School formatting · Modern formatting tools · Party!
Kids are creative and capable of writing novels
When I was a new grade 4 teacher, it amazed me to see how creative children were, so I decided to share my love of writing in the classroom.
“Class, how would you like to write a novel together?”
The response was overwhelming, so I laid out a few ground rules and emphasized a spirit of collaboration. To start, I had students divide themselves into pairs.
What followed was a happy melee as the students sorted themselves into pairs and groups of three.
Foolproof framework
Together, we collaborated on the two leading characters in the story, Gary and Carolyn. I know, I know, why do the names match the people I went to school with?
In retrospect, I’d have let the kids pick the names.
Once the characters were in place, I explained the framework for our story. The World Pool scenario began with students creeping into their elementary school at night.
In one of the rooms, they discover a swirling vortex that sucks them in and teleports them to another planet. Once we had the scenario and the characters, I chose the best writer in the room to compose the first chapter.
The following chapters began with Gary and Carolyn shooting out of the world pool onto the surface of an unknown planet. Their adventures across the terrain might include volcanoes, soccer games, or ferocious beasts, depending on which pair designed the world.
The story tested the heroes' skills and abilities as they searched the planet for another portal on the way home.
The amazing (planet) race
The story continues this way from planet to planet as they encounter trials in the form of tests, competitions, and puzzles to solve.
The beauty of this structure is that every team can write its own chapter without reference to the others. The kids invented planets inspired by their hobbies and favorite things.
There were planets based on hockey, soccer, Formula 1 racing, the Stone Age, math puzzles, a magical jungle, and “The Lizard of Paws.”
A strong writing team drafted the final chapter in which Gary and Carolyn find the last portal which brings them home.
Gentle feedback and encouragement
Once the first drafts were written, each writing team traded their chapter with another group for peer editing. I gave them a list of things to look out for and coached them to read the stories out loud to ensure they made sense.
As an adult, I can attest to the usefulness of beta readers and kids are no different. You can learn just as much from critiquing the work of other people as you can from revising your own pieces. I’m convinced that’s because you can see faults in other people’s writing more easily.
When I reread my fiction pieces, sometimes I gloss over missing words or continuity errors. That’s because if I composed it, my brain knows how to fill in the blanks. The classic way to avoid this trap is to let the story sit for a few days before returning to it with fresh eyes.
Kids are at the beginning of their writing journey working on much shorter pieces, but they might as well learn effective techniques from the beginning.
Old school formatting
After the peer-edited versions are corrected by the group, the teacher does a final edit. These are the last corrections to be made before each group makes a good copy, which at that time meant typing up a good copy.
In 2023, kids are extremely used to typing their work from the first draft. In school, they have laptops or netbooks with spelling and grammar checkers.
Back in the day, I typed a fair number of the stories myself, then photocopied the finished pages and bound each copy by hand.
Modern formatting tools
Rebooting the project today, I’d make my students e-books that their families could read on their phones. It takes little effort to produce a professional digital publication with a beautiful cover — without wasting all that paper.
For free e-book conversion, I recommend Draft2Digital. That isn’t an affiliate link, but I feel grateful to D2D for providing the free tools I needed to publish my first novel.
Writers take note, if you distribute books through D2D, they take a cut of royalties, but they don’t mind if you use their free tools to format e-books and publish directly to Apple, kobo, and Amazon.
For a student project, I would download the file which I could email to the parents. I suggest making an ePub file for those who use ebooks, and a PDF format for everybody else. To protect your kids and their identities, I would not publish the book or make it public.
The free software I have used for making ebooks is Caliber. It’s complicated but powerful.
Another option is to simply have kids work in whatever word processor you use and share that file with the parents. These days, giving parents a link to a file stored in the cloud is easy if you use something like DropBox or Google Drive.
Party!
To celebrate all the hard work your students have done, why not throw a book launch party? Parents could come in after school and listen to students read parts of their chapters. Food and music could add to the festive atmosphere. Whether you throw a party or applaud them at a school assembly, it’s important to appreciate their achievement.
By the time they plan, write, edit, and illustrate their chapters, they will have completed a novel together — an accomplishment that deserves recognition.
Want to read more about writing and creativity? Subscribe to get all my stories.