Journaling Ideas for Kids using IMPROV!

Awesome Ideas for Student Journaling Using Improv

Minds in Bloom Blog

I’m so excited to share with you one of the many ways to make your english learning classes fun. Adding a dash of journaling and improvisational theatre. Both are great modalities for learning something deeper while the students are following the fun. Hope to hear how this might work out in your class!” 

-Alan


Journaling for Students Using Improv

In education and in life, writing is an important communication skill. In most schools however, students’ writing activities are largely restricted to assignments and homework essays (and let’s face it, those aren’t usually all that fun to work on, or even to assess.) Assigning it in such a hackneyed manner makes a lot of students see writing as a mandatory chore to be trudged through, rather than the enjoyable and creative pursuit it can be.

Journaling can be fun for students!

A simple and quite effective solution to this issue is to encourage students to write journals. Journal writing carries several advantages for the writers, learning being one of special importance for us teachers. Students can be asked to maintain journals that are either subject related or general, elaborating on their own personal thoughts and experiences. Whatever form these journals take, they will prove to be an excellent means to improve students’ writing and language skills.

In addition to these journaling activities, if one were to add an embodied improvisational activity, it creates an opportunity for the student to learn in a full body way. The following are a few of the skills that journal writing can aid in developing, and some accompanying improv games you can try in your classrooms.

Analysis Through Reflection

Barring a few exercises in English/language classes, students are mostly expected to take in and accept matter as it is taught to them with very little questioning and/or self-examination.

In the journals they are asked to maintain, this gap can be filled through reflection. There are several published examples of such writing, for instance The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. She not only described what was happening but also pondered over it, producing some truly sharp insights. Similarly, students today can be encouraged to reflect on what is happening to and around them, as well as on what they’re taught in class. Journals will help them shake off the rigidity of the formal structures of writing they’re usually expected to adhere to in scholastic writing, freeing up a space for analysis.

Look for the Improv Ideas sprinkled throughout the post!

Improv Exercise: Take made up headlines like ‘Dinosaurs attack the city’ or ‘The students of Studentsville have found a lost underwater city’ and make students write an elaboration on that news story. Encourage them to follow their instinct.

Journaling that Includes Descriptive Writing

The informal nature of journaling is perfect for students to dwell on what they are writing, and to capture the details of something that has happened to them, or their own feelings about an event that is dominating headlines. They can be asked to include descriptions of what all five of their senses are telling them. This engagement will push them to explore the language in search of the right adjectives and/or synonyms – words that they might not be using in their regular assignments – bettering their vocabulary as well as strengthening their descriptive writing skills. This consistent use of vivid language should eventually make itself known in their other written projects as well.

Improv Exercise: Ask students to close their eyes and remember their favorite childhood picture. Ask them to remember it as vividly as they can. Then ask them to write down the sights, smells, sounds, textures and feelings associated with that picture. For younger students, you can ask them to list down 3 of each. 

Journaling Can improve Fluency in Articulation

A peek through submitted essays often shows poor articulation even though the student may have understood the concepts they are writing about. This is probably down to infrequency and the hidebound nature of the expected presentation. Maintaining a journal provides an open space for regular writing practice, as well as for creative expression. It will allow students to explore and experiment with the very many different ways and means through which they can express themselves. The result of this frequent untethered self-experimentation has well documented benefits, a primary one being vastly improved overall language skills.

Improv Exercise: Start the class with free writing. You can say a word, for example purple, and the students have to write 3 lines about purple. And repeat this for 4-5 words. This gets the students warmed up for a class.

Showing, Not Telling

“Show, don’t tell” is one of the most commonly given pieces of advice to writers, and is also one thing they usually struggle to execute. The intended readership of a journal is often quite limited, and likely to be already aware of the broad strokes of what is described in it. This can take the pressure off the student to communicate explicitly what happened, in essence, taking away the need to “tell”. Instead they are free to break it down, presenting the happening in a more fluid and creative manner, and to “show” it from different angles.

Improv Exercise: Ask your student to mime an everyday action and let the other students guess what it is. This exercise creates lightness in class and also conveys the fact that one does not need to always spell things out and that non-verbal cues are extremely potent too.

Cultivate the journaling habit in your students!

Written language skills can often be more challenging to develop in students than oral ones because of the (usually tedious)  labor involved. Encouraging the journaling habit paired with spontaneous and out-of-the-box improv exercises can help tremendously in reframing students’ opinions about writing by making a previously dull activity fun and creative.

Click here for a bunch more improv ideas!

These ideas are by Rick Andrews of Rick Andrews Improv.
Click on the tab at the top that says “Exercises.”

About our guest blogger…

Alan Oakman is an online STEM tutor, teaching K-12 students. His love for interdisciplinary education and everyday psychology has prompted him to start blogging. You can check out his blog and follow him on Twitter.

You might also like this resource!


Looking for more ways to make journaling fun? Check out this blog post! 

10 fun writing activities

Minds in Bloom

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