Curriculum

Year 6 Creative Writing

Have you ever noticed that many of our most loved films and stories follow the same plot structure? Films like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Spiderman, The Matrix, Finding Nemo, Mulan, The Lion King, The Incredibles, The Hobbit…the list goes on! Each of these narratives draws on the 'Monomyth' or 'Hero's Journey' structure, which plots several basic stages that almost every hero-quest goes through (no matter what culture the myth is a part of).  

In Year 6, our students learn about this structure to take their creative writing to the next level. In a series of carefully designed lessons, teachers step through the following components of the writing process to support students to write their own Hero's Journey:

• The ideation process - generating story ideas
• Creating interesting protagonists
• Character archetypes
• Figurative language
• Dialogue
• Developing the outline of a story - beginning, middle and end
• Examining the Hero's Journey Structure and mapping this to the basic story outline
• Examine texts that follow the Hero's Journey
• Defining the important story elements within the Hero's Journey:
  • Beginning:
    • Status Quo
    • The Call
    • The Assistance
    • The Threshold
  • Middle:
    • Challenge 1
    • Challenge 2
    • The Abyss (Sometimes)
  • End
    • Challenge 3 / The Abyss (Sometimes)
    • Transformation
    • The Treasure / The Result
    • The Return
• Planning the story using scaffolds such as graphic organisers and structured templates.
• Writing the story - drawing on guiding resources created in previous lessons and one-to-one conferencing with teachers.

Great work Year 6! I look forward to sharing some of the finished products towards the end of this term.

Timothy Bernau | Assistant Principal