Young Writers Society

Hey everyone,

Starting this Tuesday, I'm going to start teaching 15 highschoolers and five middleschoolers a sixteen-week writing course. The first eight weeks will concentrate on essay writing.
For the first class, I really want some icebreaking games that relate to writing (preferably nonfiction writing; I have plenty of ideas for fiction games).
Ideas, anyone? I'd appreciate it. This class is coming up fast and I'm really nervous!

Thanks a million,

~Shafter

Alrighty, I don't know if the class has started yet or not, but here's my two cents:

I did this at a workshop this summer. What you do is you assign each student an object and they have to write something from the object's point of view (in first person). What we did is we each had artifacts in a certain museum, but you can do anything I guess. We researched the objects' background and purpose and stuff like that and it was really fun.

Hope this helps!
~Azila

That's a great idea! I've never heard of that before!
In the magazine I'm involved in at my college, I heard of a writing excersize called the 'Exquisite Corpse." What happens is every person will take a piece of paper and write down the first line of a poem. Then, they'll pass it to the next person, who will hide the first line with a piece of paper so that they can't see it and add another line. At the end of the excersize, you will have twenty very interesting poems that you can get different student to read aloud, for laughs.
There's also the option of putting the students into groups and then giving either the whole class or each group a situation, and they have to write what they would do in that situation. If you come up with funny situations, it could be quite entertaining for them.
But those are fiction ideas--oops. Well, if you want a non-fiction idea, you could try having them describe something that happened to them in as real terms as possible; in other words, they need to write it using a lot of descriptive words and phrases as to make their paragraph (or whatever) like their audience was living it with them. Or you could have them write the most awful day they've ever had and then have them read it aloud to their classmates, so they can vote for the worst.
Good luck!