Today I want to share with you a little of what I was doing with the children from 7 to 10 years old and it was a course of creative writing and making handmade books. Creative writing encourages thinking and imagination, helps with writing and strengthens the learning of spelling rules and norms, besides being an important ally in the emotional balance of children because, through creative writing encourages the expression of feelings, either those that make us feel good or those that make us uncomfortable and in many cases serves as a catalyst for problematic situations by reducing stress and anxiety problems.

Source: @emimoron

The first step in the development of creative writing is to explain how a story is constructed, what are its essential elements and how to create a thematic thread of what we are telling. In this first step we explain to the children how to give life to their characters, those that they can create as they wish, with the characteristics they want, where we include shapes and colors that may or may not be real for others but that live in our minds.

Source: @emimoron

Next, the environment, where our story will develop, what will be the spaces we will create for our characters, as with the characters, we invite you to create, dream and imagine, to break with the everyday to create spaces with our imagination. Finally, the story, the theme, what we want to tell, here we teach the children a little of each of the literary genres from romance, comedy, drama, horror, tragicomedy and everything they can use and combine in their stories. Always remembering that they are the ones who choose what and how to tell it.

Source: @emimoron

To work with the children I did not make distinctions in terms of age or group division, there were a total of 10 children, and they all worked together, throughout the explanations I stopped a little to explain some concepts that were difficult for them, but in general terms my strategy of working together gave me excellent results because the older ones helped the younger ones and these in turn motivated us to create fantastic worlds.

Source: @emimoron

I allowed each one to write on the sheets they wanted, recycled, colored, lined, bond paper or cardboard, as long as they felt comfortable and motivated, the drawings were also present in the stories, the more magical and different were the characters, environments and the story, the more drawings appeared in the children's stories. When the time came to make the book, I asked them to bring recycling material, as well as colors, paints, details, frosting and appliqués, everything they had at hand at home. The idea was, among other things, to teach them the usefulness of what we sometimes think of as garbage and that in reality still has a lot of life in it.

Source: @emimoron

As with the stories, the books we made were of different sizes, shapes and colors, each one with a particular touch that had to do with the author's personality. For the front and back covers we worked with cardboard and cardboard, some used the collage technique to give life to their books and others used paints and colors. The binding was done in a simple way, using some knitting thread or sack string and making some holes on the side of the book so that we could assemble the pages with the covers and these would be attached with the cords.

Creative writing has a wonderful effect on children, it changes their perspective completely. In this week of creative work the parents were amazed that the children came home and did not want to play with their tablets, cell phones or watch TV, they wanted to continue writing, drawing and working with their imagination and their skills, something they were grateful for because after the pandemic it was very difficult to make children do manual work and with this course I demonstrated that it is only necessary to let children work with their imagination and capture what they feel and think. Thanks for reading and if you liked the experience, can you tell me if you have ever tried to let your little ones be creative through writing?