Why do children still have “nothing to write” when they memorize model essays every day? This worrying problem is a major concern for both teachers and parents. In response, Singapore’s top teacher, Teacher Zhang, proposed creative Chinese writing for Singaporean children.
In order to fundamentally stimulate students’ inner drive for writing, it is advisable to try using the vivid and living “model text” – movies.
Writing Encounter Movies not only conforms to children’s internal growth patterns and closely aligns with their focus, but also more intuitively interprets the layout and writing techniques of “model essays”. The most important thing is that both teachers and parents can obtain the “key” to awaken children’s writing from it.
Due to children’s lack of life experience and limited access to direct materials; Moreover, they are not good at observation and have difficulty obtaining indirect materials, resulting in a shortage of materials and improper expression in current writing teaching.
Therefore, for children with monotonous daily life and insufficient social experience, capturing materials from movies with a wide range of themes to make up for the lack of life experience can be a twice the result with half the effort.
Movies open up children’s writing horizons – to understand knowledge in different fields, experience different life experiences, experience different emotional experiences, and freely write about the situation, feelings, and thoughts.
Children in primary school mainly learn through their senses, using their mouth, ears, eyes, nose, and body to feel, recognize, and discover the world.
And movies can intuitively simulate a perceptible world. Excellent film works often have a huge impact on people’s spiritual world, and can even affect a generation.
Movies enter childhood, allowing children to “digest and absorb” these classics into their own spiritual bloodline in the fantasy world of light and shadow. At the same time, children’s spiritual growth can be nurtured through writing.
A child who has been immersed in excellent movies for a long time will not have poor writing skills.
If a movie wants to attract attention and love from others, it is bound to be an innovative model in certain aspects. For example, unexpected and reasonable endings, creative compositions, harmonious and wonderful soundtracks.
These new ideas are subtly passed down to children, allowing them to explore unique expressions and forge innovative ways of thinking.
Looking at creative Chinese writing for Singaporean children, we still aim to pursue “high intention, precise selection of materials, clever structure, and beautiful language” as our writing goals, emphasizing the production and expression skills of articles, but neglecting the cultivation of communication skills in writing and students’ language communication abilities.
By comparison, writing teaching in many other countries is not only aimed at enabling students to master various writing skills and forms, but also at educating students to recognize the communicative value and function of writing.
The concept of creative writing is to closely connect writing and life, so that every writer deeply feels that writing cannot do without life, and writing also enriches our lives.
How to improve children’s writing ability?
Interest is the best teacher, and the first step is to cultivate children’s interest in writing, so that they can work with half the effort.
Often telling children meaningful fairy tales or simple and easy to understand stories allows them to unconsciously be influenced by culture, thereby increasing their cultural temperament.
Encourage children to develop a good habit of reading books, persisting in reading for a while every day without demanding too much. When tired of reading, take a break and not be too demanding.
Developing the habit of keeping a diary for children can improve their writing skills to a certain extent and accumulate a lot of life materials for writing.
Give more positive and objective evaluations of what children write, improve their self-confidence, and stimulate their writing enthusiasm.
Taking creative Chinese writing for Singaporean children, as an example, the development of creative writing is not limited to the curriculum of higher education institutions.
Through the joint efforts of primary and secondary education, general education, professional teaching, and social training, its development has formed a relatively mature system and is more comprehensive. The sinicization of creative writing is being solidly promoted.