Extra-Curricular Improvement Strategy

Using Extra-Curricular Creative Writing as Both an Improvement Strategy as well as a Stretch and Challenge Activity.

The research task I conducted was an extra-curricular creative writing session for year 7 students. Throughout the sessions, taking place twice a week, each for 30 minutes, the students would recreate the Shakespeare play Romeo & Juliet. The students were modernising the play and writing a prose version of the original play. The main aim of the extra-curricular session was to assess whether a creative writing session could work as an improvement strategy for struggling students as well as working as a stretch and challenge activity for higher students simultaneously. Students of all ability in year 7 were initially given the

This encouraged more students to come along as they realised that the activity was designed to help them improve as well as being something fun for them to come along to. During the sessions, a range of resources were used to engage the students and allow them to develop their ideas in moments of them struggling. The main resources which were used were comic books of Romeo & Juliet. I decided to use two different versions of the comic books, one for students who were of lower ability as it would be more accessible to them. The other contained more detail and was therefore more appropriate for the higher ability students. The differentiated comic book versions were essential as students who were in attendance ranged from set one through to set 6 (there are 7 sets within the year group). An important way for the students to see Romeo & Juliet being modernised previously was to watch clips of the 1996 movie adaptation of the play. Students were able to see an intermediate version of the play which had been modernised somewhat. As students could see this midway point of sorts, where items such as guns are used instead of swords and the

I say most of the resources as after the first week the students rejected the idea of using the worksheets to help their development. I originally gave the students the choice whether they wanted to have a focus on the worksheets each week to help their development, but they refused this as they felt it would be more beneficial for themselves if they could just continue with their own writing of the stories. The goal for the activity was for the students to develop their skills, whilst having fun and expressing their skills, not about completing worksheets. “Students express themselves and their own ideas. Most teachers would agree that what we want to say, what comes from the heart, we are happier to work on. Creative writing can be very stimulating and a lot of fun.” (TeachingEnglish, 2003) states that “creative writing can be very stimulating and a lot of fun”. If this is true, students should be given time to express themselves through their own creative writing, where they can complete something which stimulates them. This is more beneficial as opposed to having them complete resources where they will either rush them with poor work to get onto the actual creative writing or take too long on them and not complete the creative writing, leaving them further behind other students. Once it was agreed and decided that the students did not find it beneficial to