Tag Archives: halloween writing process

Oct6

Get Into the Halloween Spirit: Books, Online Course, and More!

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Happy October everyone! Are you ready to have some fun this fall? This was always my favorite time of year as a teacher. I tried to channel all of that creative excitement with Halloween into writing and language arts projects for my students. Through this, I developed a “How to Write a Spooky Story” unit that I have now made available in many different forms through the years. I’ve even written a pumpkin story that originated from one of my own spooky stories as a child. So, if you’re ready to explore the fantastic learning opportunities for your child, here is a list of all that is available that I’ve put together.

Full Online Free Spooky Story Writing Unit: This is a free online unit that I posted over five years ago. I made it a simplified version of what I used to do in my classroom, and it takes about a week. Children can follow along with each post daily, and create their own shareable story by the end. I relist the posts each year. I’ve seen visitors from around the world engage in story writing, and I’m proud to again share the links and posts to keep generations of children writing. This is great for parents or basics for teachers to assign online.

Day 1: Write Your Own Spooky Story, Create Your Main Character

Day 2: Creating a Spooky Setting Or Plot

Day 3: Starting the Rough Draft

Day 4: Continuing Rough Draft with Dialogue

Day 5: Revising and Proofreading Your Story

Day 6: Writing the Final Draft

Spooky Story Online Writing School Course: If you just want to get your child set up and running with a course that will do all the teaching for you, guess what? I’ve started my own online writing school, and have put together the above unit into a self-teaching course. It goes more in-depth than the free online one, and I’m there to support too. Check out the link below to get more information. It’s just $19.99.

Spooky Story Online Course

For Teachers: Teachers Pay Teachers Spooky Story Unit: If you’d like to teach the unit to your own classroom, I’ve got the full writing workshop format unit I developed at Teacher Pay Teachers. I also have a unit on writing mysteries and other helpful writing lesson plans that are available. It’s just $2.95.

Spooky Story Unit @ Teachers Pay Teachers

My own Halloween picture book story, Pumper the Pumpkin, is available online at Amazon.com. I wrote this originally when I was ten in 5th grade, and discovered the magic of writing. The main story stuck with me, and I rewrote it as an adult. This is the latest form of the story illustrated by myself. It was my first attempt at a picture book, and I learned a lot from creating it. It’s just $0.99.

Pumper the Pumpkin on Amazon.com

So, get ready for Halloween and focus all that creative energy into creative writing for your child. All of the writing techniques work for adults too. So, if you’d like to take a stab at spooky or horror story writing along with your child, you could share the stories between you.

Happy Halloween 2021! Stay safe!

-Mrs. Turner

Sep24

Tiffany Turner To Teach Online Spooky Story Writing Workshop

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It’s getting near that spooky time of year. After over 15 years of teaching a spooky story workshop to my students, I’m offering it for the first time online. Bring Halloween indoors in an academic way, and keep this season spooky, fun and safe! It will be available two ways.

1) This first way to sign up for this workshop is as a full online in-person experience taught by myself live on Zoom. It will be available through the tutoring center called Knowledge Quest. I’ve worked there now for 3 years tutoring students in person and in local schools before the pandemic.

Now, the opportunity to learn from myself, a published author and certified teacher, is through Knowledge Quest. It starts on Oct. 5 through Oct. 29. There are two sessions, one for grades 3-5 and the other for grades 6-8. Each session will have one hour a week for four sessions. Kids will have an hour of instruction and will be walked through activities and given assignments to continue writing between sessions.

**Some at home support, such as looking over the story and doing feedback with your child, will be required.

I’ve taught and developed this spooky story unit over the years and I have put up some parts of it FREE to do through my website. But this is the full unit, developed by me, and available only this upcoming month of October. By the end of the sessions, all the students will have written their own stories that they can share on Halloween night. They will learn character development, create a plot with problem/solution structure, study the spooky genre, and have a lot of fun! They’ll have a chance to unlock the creativity within them.

**Note times are Pacific Daylight Time since I’ll be teaching the workshop live through Zoom. Sign-ups for the live Zoom instructional spooky workshop is through Knowledge Quest.

Find out more and REGISTER HERE!

2) The second way to take the workshop, especially if it would be difficult to in your time zone, is to sign up for my online writing school course. It’s the first course available, and I plan to develop more through the next several months. I’ve decided to develop the spooky story writing workshop first since the basic posts on the blog are so popular, and my students loved it as their favorite story during the school year.

Here is the blurb from my writing school “Keep On Writing”:

Ready to have some fun writing? Here’s a course to help children love writing and enjoy it. I often found children didn’t get to enjoy the writing projects assigned when I was a teacher. So, I developed an, exciting “Spooky Story” writing project for the month of October that I taught for over fifteen years in my classroom. Now, your child can experience the joy of writing and using their imagination.

Taught through a Writing Workshop format, I go over all the steps of writing, prewriting, drafting, revision and proofreading and creating a final draft. Each lesson includes mini-lessons on the craft of writing including organizing ideas through graph organizers, writing dialogue, “Show, Don’t Tell”, plot creation, character creation and conflict, and problem/solution story structure.

Write your own Spooky Story in either a live workshop with Mrs. Turner or in her online writing school. Get spooky and stay safe this Halloween! Use your imagination and write!

When your child finishes the course, they will have a fantastic story of their own creation to share with family and friends. As they go through the writing process, they are asked to work with a family member or guardian with the writing process in which they learn to gain feedback on their writing and make changes. Anyone in the family or through Zoom can fulfill this role making it a bonding activity with your child.

Whether this course is being used during the fall for a Halloween project or any time during the year to engage children in writing, or help adults write for children, it has always been a student and child favorite. I now present to you, the “Spooky Story” Writing Project to help bring the joys of writing to your child.

The online writing school course is $19.99.

LINK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE & REGISTER!

**Happy Halloween!

-Mrs. Turner

Oct21

Spooky Writing Project Unit On Sale 10/21-10/23 @ TeachersPayTeachers

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spookystoryunitbkcvrSo, I’ve been writing down all my teaching wisdom to preserve and share it with current and future teachers. I’ve had 18 years experience teaching with a specialty in writing. So, I’ve been writing up some fabulous projects on TeachersPayTeachers.com. I’ve just put my Spooky Story writing project unit on sale for this weekend, 10/21-10/23. The unit follows current Common Core standards. It’s on sale for $2.36. Unit includes graphic organizers(worksheets), sample writing paragraphs, grading rubric, and all the lesson plans for the unit. It even includes a Spooky Book Summary Report.

I’ve had kids over and over say this was their favorite project in my classroom. So, if you’re a teacher and need something for Halloween, have the kids write a story. They can’t get enough of this. Or even if you’re a parent and you want to keep your kids busy from now until Halloween, try this project and have them read it on Halloween night. There is nothing more magical than watching kids entertain themselves with their own writing.

LINK To TEACHERS PAY TEACHERS HERE For Spooky Story Project!

Plus, my Halloween read-aloud is available exclusively on Amazon Here!

And I’ve just posted a new writing unit for Mysteries!

Hot off the presses: Mystery Genre Writing Unit LINK HERE!

OH yes, have a spooky and safe Halloween!

Oct30

Write Your Own Spooky Story Day 5: Revision and Proofreading Your Story

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Writing Your Own Spooky Story Day 5: Revision and Proofreading

Writing Your Own Spooky Story Day 5: Revision and Proofreading

To Note: This whole activity is available online at my new “Keep On Writing” Online Writing School. It’s set up as a tutorial to allow kids to work at their own pace with more in depth instruction. For more information, LINK HERE!

Welcome to Day 5 of writing your own Spooky Story. Well, tomorrow is the big day, Halloween. And I’m sure if you’ve been working hard all week, you’ve got your rough draft done and ready to polish today. This is when you need to find a partner to listen to your story, and give you some feedback. Feedback is comments about what the person liked, what works, and what might need to be changed. They should listen to and let you know if anything is confusing or hard to understand. I’ve always taught this aspect through the writing workshop process, and often gave my students a feedback worksheet to work with. Below are the questions I would include on the sheet for them to fill out.

Your partner can be an older sibling (brother or sister), cousin, Mom or Dad, Grandparent or even Aunt or Uncle. You can also have your friends work with you as well. Writer’s call this a critique group. We often have a network of fellow writers, or betareaders, that read through our stories and give us feedback on what to improve.

You might also notice I mentioned listened. It’s best that you read your story out loud to your partner. That way, it is easier for you to hear what works, check on how dialogue flows, and how your descriptions read. You can often catch awkward and hard to understand sentences this way.

So, here is a list of questions for your betareader(partner) to answer as they listen to your story:

  1. What was your favorite part? Why?
  2. What would you want to know more about in the story?
  3. Is there anything, words or sentences, that were confusing in the story?
  4. What details in the story stood out the most?
  5. What would you want to see in the next story?

After you’ve had a chance to go over some revision, only then let your partner look over your story for corrections in punctuation or spelling. They are welcome to look through and catch any changes they may find. Then, it’s your turn to go back and rewrite the parts and make changes they suggested. When you’re done, show it to them again. See if they suggest anything else.

Most writers do this about 4-5 times. I know, you think, wow, that’s a lot. As a beginning writer try this at least once. Make changes, and show them to your partner one more time. In the last rewrite, they should probably be less often. That’s when you know you’re ready to copy from a revision draft to a final draft.

When you get to that point, you’re ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow, it’s all about copying into a nice final draft to read for friends and family on Halloween. You’re ALMOST there! Have fun today and tonight! You’re in the home stretch.

Meanwhile, looks like I got my phone working. So, I’m going to try the Periscope Broadcast at 3:30 pm PDT. Look for @Tiffmeister. That’s in about 1/2 hr from uploading this post. So, I’ll be going over the steps the last few days, answering questions you might have, and enjoying any comments you have for me. I would love the feedback. Again, Periscope is an app. that is available on Android and iPhone. I’m sure it’s also on iPads too since it’s in the iTunes store. Just head over to the apps section, type in Periscope, and you’re there. So, hope to hear from you. Until then, happy revising! -Tiffany Turner (Mrs. Turner)

Oct27

Write Your Own Spooky Story: Day 2 Supporting Characters/Setting/Plot Planning

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Create a spooky setting with supporting characters to help with the problem towards a solution.

Create a spooky setting with supporting characters to help with the problem towards a solution.

Write Your Spooky Story Day 2: Supporting Characters, Setting, Plot Planning

Note: This whole activity is available online at my new “Keep On Writing” Online Writing School. It’s set up as a tutorial to allow kids to work at their own pace with more in depth instruction. For more information, LINK HERE!

Welcome back. Today is Day 2 of writing your own Spooky story. I’ve been getting feedback from people that you’re looking forward to writing a story with me this week. This totally makes me excited. I do really love helping people bring out their inner muse no matter what your age is. So, if you’d like to leave comments with questions or what your trying this week, I’ll be happy to respond.

Today, we’ll be working on creating sidekicks and villians. In every story, there needs to be conflict. These supporting characters help create that. First, let’s get some definitions. Sidekick: This is a supporting character for the main character. They can be their confidant and even go along with them as a wingman or helper to face oppositional conflicts. Villian: is also known as the antagonist. This is the character that causes opposition to the protagonist, also known as the hero or main character. They are not necessarily considered the “Bad” guy, or at least, they don’t consider themselves to be the bad guy or gal. They are simple the opposite of the hero.

They can be created similar to the main character, but you need to keep in mind what their motivation or interest in the main character might be. They should have a function relating to the hero or heroine.

All your characters should have these four elements:***

Character=Who

Their Goal=What

Their Motivation=Why

Their Conflict=Why Not

Setting Choice: Choosing a spooky setting will add to your horror fiction. Most spooky stories are set in a haunted house, haunted graveyard, haunted (Fill in the blank). You can get creative with this. Just keep in mind this is an important story element to make your story spooky. You’re characters can even move from a normal setting into the spooky setting later in your story. Just keep in mind, your description in your rough draft will make this spooky setting come alive.

Once you’ve got these basics mapped out for your characters, you’ll be ready for the next step, creating a plot or conflict. This is known as the problem. Give your characters a problem that will motivate them to reach their goal. Then, give them 3 tries to solve it. The first three tries should fail. The last try should be the solution. Once you’ve solved their problem, wrap up the ending conflict with a happily ever after or you could end with a cliffhanger if you want to write a sequel. A cliffhanger is leaving a problem or questions still not finished or answered.

For today’s assignment, you can use the character webbing graphic from yesterday to create your sidekick and villain. Then, use the graphic below to create a basic plot outline or plan. You need to create a problem, 3 attempts to solve the problem in the middle, with the last attempt being the solution. I usually number my attempts 1, 2, 3.

That will give your story a beginning, middle and end. Once you have all of this outlined or mapped, you’re prewriting will be done and you’ll be ready to start your rough draft.

So get busy. Tomorrow is the big day to start the official first draft, the most creative part of the writing process. Happy writing! -Tiffany Turner (Mrs. Turner)

***Information cited from Advanced Fiction Writing by Steve Alcorn.

Story map to plan out your plot, characters and setting.

Story map to plan out your plot, characters and setting.

Pumper the Pumpkin: A Halloween Tale by Tiffany Turner is a Kindle Unlimited title. Free Oct. 27-31!

Pumper the Pumpkin: A Halloween Tale by Tiffany Turner is a Kindle Unlimited title. Free Oct. 27-31!

Plus, for this week only starting today, Oct. 27, my Halloween Tale, Pumper the Pumpkin will be available for free on Amazon. Here is the link: http://www.amazon.com/Pumper-Pumpkin-Tiffany-Turner-ebook/dp/B005X1CS1A