A few weeks ago I started a club aimed at motivating Year 6 boys with their creative writing skills. I had a group of 10 boys who didn't enjoy writing and after speaking with their class teachers i found that getting 10 lines out of them was an achievement. So my aim was to getting them excited about writing again. My first post on the first lessons about Wordle can be found here
So after the first lesson of using Worlde to gather descriptive words for different worlds and levels we moved on to the characters. Now if you are not familiar with idea of Fan-Fiction stories is good to know that they are the perfect way to blend various "universes" together. For example Mario can meet Sonic or even Ratchet and Clank within the Fan-Fiction. This allows for the pupils to add their favourite game characters from different games. The one thing i wanted to keep the same through-out their work was the setting which was going to be the Mario World.
So like the level Wordle creations we created we moved to creating verions for the characters. Below are a few for Yoshi, Bowser and Mario.
So we had a catalogue of good descriptive words for worlds, levels and characters so moved on to the story set-up. I asked them to brainstorm and see what adventures their characters could be involved in. They came up with:
Super Smash Brothers competition
A boxing match between Toad and Bowser
Mario Kart racing
Mario Team vs Sonic Team at the Olympics
Mario saves the Princess Peach
A lot of these ideas came from the other Mario titled games they had played at home which they all related too. So we now had our characters, levels & worlds and our scenarios. Some pupils worked together and others on their own and for 3 weeks we had 45 minutes of writing and dedicated the last 15 minutes to play Super Mario Brothers Wii. This worked as nice little encouragement factor but also with their familiarity with the game characters, we watched the cut scenes in the game and they found out that some of them had accents or different characteristics they could use in their stories.
Below are some of the pupils work, although some never finished their work due to time constraints the work they created was a huge leap for these boys. I even had other pupils ask to join what was essentially a Literacy booster class, which never happens.
Super Smash Bros Fan Fic
Mario Kart Fan Fic
Mario Kart 2
Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympics
I hope to continue with this project and push it out to more pupils who are interested when September rolls around.
Simon White - Cleveland Junior School