Creative Writing in Middle School, Year Two

If you were reading my blog in January, you know that I spent about three weeks co-teaching a creative writing unit with a Language Arts teacher at my son’s middle school.  We had a blast — so much so that we couldn’t wait to do it again this year!

I started on Monday, and I’m doing my best not to talk too much… but there’s so much I want to tell them!  We’re doing more writing this year, though, which is a lot of fun.

There are some really talented writers in this class, some really creative minds at work. I asked them if I could share with you some of what we did yesterday:  a writing exercise I call “Blowing Up Similes.”  The idea here is that as writers, we tend to use the same old boring similes over and over because they are easy and  familiar, both to us and to our readers.  As hard as a rock, as quiet as a mouse, as dumb as a post…  I challenged them to come up with new, different, never-before-seen similes.  They could write down the usual ones first if they wanted to but then try to go beyond.  I said, you can say “as hard as stone,” but you can also say “as hard as my teacher’s test.”  And they were off.

Here are some of the new similes they chose as the best:

As dark as an unlucky cat

As short as my mom’s mustache

As quiet as a shark swimming through the sea

As soft as Laffy Taffy

As dry as a sidewalk in summer

As big as a blizzard

As cold as a shiver