Picture Prompts Inspire ‘Engaging’ Creative Writing

June 18 2024

As part of their Narratives Main Lesson, Class 9 pupils work on their own creative writing as a response to picture prompts. Read several ‘engaging’ examples of work below. GCSE Art pupils’ exhibition can now be viewed virtually, linked to in the full Tuesday Notice below.

In the Narratives Main Lesson, Class 9 look at the question: Why do we need stories? They consider what are the essential elements of the story arc, the various ways we receive stories, and the power of storytelling itself.

In the first half of the Main Lesson, the course studies the origins of storytelling from earliest times. For instance, it traces an Oral Tradition from Creation Myths to Epics like Beowulf, the Bardic tradition of storytelling and riddles. Pupils will write their own Creation stories, devise their own kenning, and start to question the purpose of stories in both ancient and modern society.

In the second part of the Main Lesson the Class take a deep dive into a number of Ballads from Mediaeval beginnings through Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ and Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and beyond.

Lastly, they look into the history of the beginnings of the novel in English from Daniel Defoe to Dickens and ask ‘What purpose does the novel serve?’

As a Class, they read the short novel ‘Of Mice and Men’ by John Steinbeck, which gave the opportunity to understand what Colleridge termed the ‘Sympathetic Imagination.’ This story describes the lives of people living in very different times to our own, where the main characters struggled with dire poverty and discrimination. We experience how the novel can engage and educate our feelings and become a catalyst of change.

There are opportunities for pupils to work on their own creative writing throughout this Main Lesson, either as a response to texts the Class are reading or from picture prompts.

“The results were very engaging”, says Narratives Main Lesson Teacher, Deirdre Hill.