Sam Marsden shows how you can use a sequence of drama exercises to invigorate pupils’ creative writing…
If you’re looking to inspire your students to write creatively, drama can be used as tool to prompt ideas, develop characters and awaken imaginations.
Charles Dickens is said to have acted out his characters as he wrote; when one reads his work, that’s not hard to imagine, as he clearly knew his characters inside and out.
Bringing drama exercises into your creative writing classroom can move pupils from staring at a blank page and onto creating powerful stories with believable characters.
Letting pupils be a little silly is no bad thing either, when it comes to being creative.
Learning objectives
- Use props as stimuli for a new story
- Trust your intuition and story ideas
- Use acting techniques to develop a character for creative writing
- Use your body to portray a character
Starter activity
Before any drama activity, it’s a good idea to play a quick warm-up game to get everyone in the creative mindset.
One fun warm-up game is a variation of musical statues. Play some music and encourage everyone to dance. Then stop the music and call out something that all the children should pretend to be a statue of.
This could be, for example, a witch, banana, monkey, frog, tower, rainbow or monster. As you move on to the next activity, remind the children that drama class is a judgement-free zone, and there’s no such thing as a wrong idea.
Encourage pupils to observe the two rules of ‘be kind’ and ‘good listening’.
Sam Marsden has taught drama for 15 years in a variety of settings. She’s the author of 100 Acting Exercises for 8–18 Year Olds, Acting Games for Improv, Drama Games for Early Years, and Acting Exercises for Creative Writing. Browse more character description resources.
