Writing is a core part of anyone’s educational journey. It is one of those highly transferable, fundamental skills that are useful to everyone. Learning to write is empowering. Channeling creative energy and therefore discovering how to develop autonomous narratives is something else entirely. All children need is someone to open the door and give them a pen. They can take care of the rest. Here are eight reasons why creative writing is just an integral part of education and always will be.
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It Develops Essential Creative Expression
Creative expression is so important for every child. It shapes your development in such an integral way that it is hard to argue with the fact that children who have an outlet for their creative expression are better able to regulate their emotions. They have better social relationships and a deeper insight into who they are and what they stand for. The ability to express yourself is innate but also taught and shaped by environmental circumstances. When children are given free rein in their writing, there are infinite boundaries and places they can roam to.
Supporting Creativity Enhances Educational Engagement
How do you keep children engaged with their scholastic journey? You make sure what they are doing is fun. You ensure that the things they are learning connect with their brain. You allow space for autonomous learning and child-led strategies within the classroom and for external learning too. Being given the space to be a truly, untampered with creative translates into learning freedom. Freedom means a child gains a sense of empowerment from what they are doing in the learning environment and they are more motivated to carry out figuring out what works for them vs. what doesn’t. This is where they learn how to guide their studies and all of the things that will shape their futures.
There are Opportunities to Explore Tech Skills Too
Creative writing lessons can be combined with any number of tech skills. Whether this is using programs like this one here, https://studentreasures.com/start-your-classbook/scripsi/, to create online stories or something else entirely, it is undeniable that computer skills are becoming more and more essential for the next generations. It will give them confidence in modern innovation and ensure that when they do reach an age where they are needing these fundamental skillsets, their creative writing practices have already begun to pave the way for cementing what’s to come.
You Can Explore Every Academic Topic With Free Writing Time
Aside from tech skills, there is always an opportunity with creative writing to completely explore every other topic on the curriculum as well. Children (and anyone) can write about anything, after all. If you want to make a lesson all about a story that incorporates mathematical concepts and get the class to play along, why not? Some students are bound to connect and respond with this more than any other method out there.
It Improves Core Language Skills
One of the biggest benefits of regular creative writing is how it improves core language skills. Developing language is a natural process in the early years in the right environment. However, as life goes on it is very much an active process. For children to understand all about their language, speech, grammatical structures, and everything else in between, they have to use their language in these formats. When they are given this opportunity on a regular basis, they will be able to excel and exceed all their own expectations and organically accumulate their skills in all these core areas.
Enhancing Empathy and Emotional Regulation
Creative writing is also a great outlet for appropriate, constructive emotional teaching too. Learning how to regulate emotions is not a skill that everyone acquires, but it is an important one nevertheless. Through writing, some children will find a sense of peace that they have never known. They will bring characters to life with a range of feelings, thoughts, backgrounds, and desires. This will in turn teach and breed empathy, and a deeper insight into their own strengths and struggles that they may face in daily life or as they grow up.
It Encourages Reading
Reading is again, one of those essential skills that everyone needs to thrive in the world. When children write, they are more inclined to read. The two go hand in hand and complement a fully developed mind. They serve to thrive and they will always be practically co-existent as long as children are writing, they are more likely to be reading. Books are one of those things that seem inescapable. The platforms might be changing and developing in line with technology and innovation but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t still investing in the stories. Children read stories from a very young age, and this is something that they are used to for all of their childhood. These stories are the things that will spark their own imagination to bring to life their own versions or iterations of traditional tales and move into completely new directions.
Creative Writing Can Be Done Alone or As a Team
Finally, creative writing as a class is amazing. It is also amazing when it is done as a single student project. There are somewhat limitless opportunities here to teach a range of learning styles and enable pupils to adapt to a wider sense of stability within the curriculum. Working as a team is an important skill to acquire because it will be transferable down the line in a professional capacity, it teaches patience and cooperation and it shows younger children how to embrace other people’s opinions and desires.
Lone working is also an essential skill because independence is the backbone of education. Forming your own way of thinking will enhance the way you learn for the rest of your life. You need to learn time management and how to make decisions and writing alone can bring all of this and more.
Creative writing is extremely important for young children and throughout the whole of school life. So many skills can be built upon through writing and it is something that has thrived in this setting for many years.
