Around this time last year the stars aligned and all my classes were doing creative writing at the same time. So naturally, I decided to turn the classroom into a crime scene. Whilst this was an awesome lesson, it wasn’t until afterwards that I realised how potentially inappropriate this could have been. Thankfully it was all fine. The kids LOVED it. We used the scene as a live stimulus for their writing.

This is what the kids were saw when arriving to class:

In small groups students were invited to cross the tape line and investigate the interactive scene, gathering as many clues as they could to inspire their work.

  Inside the wallet was an appointment card for a local business.

This year I’m thinking I’d like to modify the idea. Whilst the kids loved the scene, as a marker I found all four classes wrote very similar stories. I’d like to explore this in conjunction with genre, teaching them to take a generic stimulus and turn it into unique story. Anyway, something to work on 🙂