The Five Steps of the Writing Process for Fun Teaching

This is the planning step in the writing process. The writer should research, plan and organize his writing so that the actual writing process will run more smoothly. Writers may find keeping a journal, writing out descriptions of each character and outlining the entire essay, article or story helpful. If you want to make this activity more fun, do it together as a class. Show the class some simple pictures, which can be abstract pictures or simple drawings of situations such as a man at a restaurant. Ask for suggestions about may be happening in each picture to help students generate ideas for stories.

The writing stage engages students in actually creating a text. Writers should strive to complete the whole text, even if it's imperfect, using this stage to build off of what they outlined. In your class arrange your students in a circle ,and tell them that you will create a story together. One student starts with just one word. The next student makes the next word in that sentence. Keep going around until the story is complete.

The stage in the writing process in which a writer looks over her work and makes changes to what she wrote is the revising process. You can teach basic revision skills by taking a few short stories and cutting them up into individual sentences. Put each story in its own envelope. In pairs or small groups the students should attempt to put the stories together in the correct order. You can also work on sentence structure by taking individual sentences and cutting them up into words. See who can complete this activity the fastest.

Although not necessarily fun, the editing stage is nonetheless necessary. Before publishing anything, a writer should make all the necessary changes to ensure that his work is as strong as possible. Prepare one page and purposely insert several errors. Give the students a photocopy of the page, and tell them to correct the errors. To make this more fun, read through the text out loud, and instruct your students to yell "stop" when they hear a mistake. Turn it into a game, giving one point to a student whenever he spots or hears an error. The student with the most points wins.

Publishing doesn't necessarily mean that a writer will publish a book. Rather, the publishing stage is about submitting the final draft of a text. Ask your students to keep journals about their daily activities, instructing them not to write down anything too personal. Tell the class to submit these journals once a week. Read a few excerpts and tell the class to guess who they belong to. Knowing that their work might be read out loud will also encourage your students to submit their best work.