Exploring Creative Writing Approaches and Impacts to Writing Development

Creative Writing is a way for students to express their own thoughts and ideas through imaginative writing (YourDictionary 2016). This process is often flexible and develops over time. It is important to allow students to choose a process that works for them and strengthen their writing by utilizing a particular technique such as technology or student journals. Often, students do not get the chance to do so. During my student teaching placement, I analyzed data collected from a second grade classroom after I introduced different writing techniques such as journaling, digital story telling, and note taking. Students were not prompted and their work was not revised by anyone else. It was purely up to the students what they wrote about. It is important for students to be able to structure their work in any way they wanted to because this allowed them to think creatively and in a way that supported their success. After implementing different writing approaches, I analyzed student journals and digital story telling apps. This consisted of delving into my students’ work to look for recurring themes by applying repetitions, transitions or similarities or differences in the students’ different writing pieces. I also looked for improvement of spelling and grammatical errors throughout their writing pieces. When I analyzed notes taken from the field, I looked for commonalities between the entries and I also looked to see if there was any missing data from what I had observed. Results support that introducing different writing techniques improved spelling, vocabulary and increased creativity in student writing.