How to teach your child to write a novel: Lesson 1: Genre

Junior Secret Noveling Club

You're reading the second in a series of posts that will show you how to teach your elementary-age child to write a novel. Make sure you've read your preparation lesson first!

Greeting:

This is the first meeting of your group. Serve a nice big donut to everyone, or something comparably exciting that fits your foodstyle. Celebrate the fact that you're launching this big endeavor. Join up around the table and get ready to novel. Pass out your notebooks, explain about the badges, and you're off!

Name the Club:

Ask each of the children to think of their favorite word. Think of a word that inspires them, that makes them feel creative, that creates interesting pictures in the mind. An adventure word, a mystery word, a colorful word, a delicious word. Write each of these words on the white board and then craft your club name out of all of these names. It will sound RIDICULOUS. That’s good. It’s key that each child feel that he/she has ownership of this club, and putting their own word into the title is much better than collaborating on a simpler title that everyone likes. My students came up with this: The Junior Secret Dreams of the Spirit Cyclops Magic of Elves and Novelsmarts Noveling Club.

Write the Oath:

Have the students open to a blank page in their notebooks. Ask them to think of their favorite book, and write down three things that made the book really great. It could be a quality of the writing, like “mystery” or “adventure.” It could be something specific like “lots of brothers and sisters” or “happy ending.” Anything they liked about it is fair. Then ask them to think of a book that they weren’t crazy about, and write down three reasons why. It could be that it was too boring, or that there were spiders in it, or that the chapters were too long, etc.

After each child has decided on and shared their three qualities of good writing and three qualities of bad writing, work on developing a group list — what can they all agree will make a great book, and what can they all agree will kill a book? From these you can write your oath. Here’s what my students came up with: I promise to always write with fantasy, mystery and adventure. I promise never to write boring stuff with girly-girl tea parties and realistic school. Have the students write down their name, their oath, but leave the threat part blank.

Here is the link to print out the name and oath worksheet. There are four to a page, small so they will fit into their 5x7 sized notebooks: Name and Oath Worksheet.

Genre Lesson:

First explain what a genre is with examples. One metaphor I used is dessert. Dessert comes in genres — ice cream, candy, cake, pie. Within these genres are individual examples, but there are certain characteristics of candy bars as opposed to pie that make each one recognizable. Pie is not frozen, cake is not mushy, ice cream doesn’t come in a wrapper, etc. Ask the kids if they can think of a type of book, and as soon as they give you one good genre, put it on the white board, and start generating a list of elements that define that genre. Scifi: robots, space travel, computers, aliens. Fantasy: unicorns, elves, swords, magic. Here are the genres you should hit on: Sci fi, fantasy, western, historical, modern drama. You can also do romance, supernatural, horror, and others if your kids are aware of these types of books and old enough to write in these styles.

When you’ve made a list of stuff you might find in each of these genres, have the kids do the genre worksheet and paste it into their books.

Here is the link to download the genre worksheet: Genre Worksheet.

They should choose a genre and make a list of six cool things that they want to include somewhere in their books. A Pegasus, a secret, a dry riverbed, a potion — it can be anything at all that stimulates their imaginations. After each student has completed the worksheet and you've pasted it into the book, give out the badges. Yay!

DO NOT: Worry if everything they think of is extremely trite. Most of it will be terribly trite, and that’s absolutely fine.

DO NOT: Ever, ever, ever tell a student that one of their ideas is bad or wrong or say something like “you can do better than that!”

DO NOT: Give the child the “answer” or tell a child what to write. Don’t help with answers or ideas.

DO: Suggest ways to expand an idea. Ask questions. Say “What if?”

DO: Always say “That is great. You are doing a fantastic job.” It’s very very easy to say these words, very very hard for a child to sit with criticism. There is absolutely no harm in telling them that everything they do think of is a fantastic idea, because even if it isn’t, with the proper encouragement, the *next* idea they have might be the great one, and it’s not your job to defeat them, but to build them up.

DO: Give the child tons of time. Don’t push. But also don’t let them linger and get themselves too crazy. If a child is stuck, can’t work it out, and nothing is working, suggest they put it away for now and come back later, and specify a time to come back to it, so it doesn’t just fade away. It’s also possible to ask the student if he/she wants help from the group, and open it up to the other children to give help and suggestions, if that’s welcome.

Grammar Wrap-up:

Talk about nouns. After you discuss what a noun is and how they work, talk about using specific nouns rather than general ones. Try tossing out some nouns like car, dog, building, chair, and see if they can think of more specific nouns, nouns that create an image in the reader’s mind, rather than making the reader guess at what the author intends. Talk about capitalizing proper nouns.

To reinforce the idea of nouns, have them come up with a noun for every letter of the alphabet.

Homework:

Correct the spellings on your alphabet of nouns. 

All lessons include links to printable worksheets and documents, so everything you need is right here!

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