unit 6 critical thinking questions creative writing

Creative Writing for Critical Thinking

Creating a Discoursal Identity

• © 2018
• Hélène Edberg 0

Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden

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• Introduces a new analytical model, based on activity theory, making it possible to analyse learning through writing in student texts
• Examines student trajectories as they learn to think critically through creative writing
• Offers practical advice as well as theoretical grounding to support this new approach

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

Hélène Edberg

Creative Writing and Critical Thinking: From a Romantic to a Sociocritical View on Creative Writing

Basic outlines of the research, discoursal identity and subject, text as a site of negotiation: a model for text analysis, writers’ positions, critical metareflection, a follow-up study: creative writing for critical metareflection in a different context, concluding discussion about discoursal identity and learning critical thinking through creative writing, creative writing for critical metareflection: some educational implications, back matter.

• discourse analysis
• textual analysis
• meta-reflection
• creative writing
• identity negotiation
• critical thinking
• literary diction

About this book

Authors and affiliations, about the author, bibliographic information.

Book Title : Creative Writing for Critical Thinking

Book Subtitle : Creating a Discoursal Identity

Authors : Hélène Edberg

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65491-1

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Social Sciences , Social Sciences (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-319-65490-4 Published: 20 February 2018

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-319-88041-9 Published: 11 May 2019

eBook ISBN : 978-3-319-65491-1 Published: 08 February 2018

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : IX, 416

Number of Illustrations : 2 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour

Topics : Discourse Analysis , Language and Literature , Stylistics , Creative Writing , Popular Science in Linguistics

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Home » Tips for Teachers » The 9 Best Creative and Argumentative Writing Prompts for 6th Grade

The 9 Best Creative and Argumentative Writing Prompts for 6th Grade

Keeping middle schoolers excited about writing is important. Writing is such an essential skill that students will need as they complete their education and move on to finding a real job.Many middle school-age students, however, often begin seeing writing as something that isn’t fun or worthwhile. Other students get discouraged about their abilities as a writer and may stop trying their best.

Finding the best writing prompts for 6th grade is so important in keeping students excited and writing and seeing it as something that is worth their time.A few years ago, I took a job as a 6th grade writing teacher. I almost immediately noticed that many of my students seemed bored with writing, while others seemed to shut down when asked to write.I searched and found some engaging writing prompts that sparked my students’ interest. What a difference it made! Students that claimed writing was ‘useless’ were now engaged and sharing their work with others!

I’d love to help you bring about this change in your students, too! Continue reading, and I’ll share:

• The 6th grade writing standards →
• Advantages of using writing prompts with your lessons →
• My favorite creative writing prompts for 6th grade →
• My favorite argumentative writing prompts for 6th grade →

5 Creative Writing Prompts for 6th Grade

Providing students with opportunities for creative writing is important. Creative writing can help students process their emotions, build their confidence, express their individuality, and increase their imagination.

Below are some of my favorite creative writing prompts for 6th grade.  You can use document cameras in order to follow your student’s writing.

Prompt: When you become disappointed, what do you do to manage your emotions?

Before having students begin writing, brainstorm some possible reactions as a class. These may include crying, breathing deeply, counting to 10, taking a break/removing oneself from the situation. After brainstorming, have students select the strategy (or strategies) that best describe their reactions and write about what they do.

2. Flying Superpower

Prompt: One morning, you wake up and realize that you are suddenly able to fly. What adventures would you like to go on?

This writing prompt will really tap into students’ creativity and imagination. Since flying is something they clearly have never done, they will have to think about all the things that would be possible and choose a few to write about.

3. Letter to Future Self

Prompt: Write a letter to your future self. What would you want yourself to know?

Tell students that they will be writing a letter to themselves to read when they are older. You can either pick an age/milestone (graduating from college, getting their first job, having children, etc.), or allow students to pick. Ask students to think about what they believe would be important to know at that juncture in their life and include it in their letter.

You could also modify this by having students write a letter to their past selves. What would they have wanted to know at the beginning of the school year, before they lost their first tooth, or before they even learned how to walk?

4. No Internet for a Month

Prompt: If there was no internet available for a month, what would you do?

This could be a fun one to do with middle schoolers who are so dependent on technology and the internet. Before students begin writing, get them to brainstorm a list of all the ways their lives are dependent on the internet.

Encourage them to think beyond the ‘obvious’ online game play and video streaming to consider other impacts such as ordering items online or communicating via email with friends and family.

5. Genie in a Bottle

Prompt: You released a genie from her magic bottle, and she said she would give you any talent that you ask for. What talent would you want and why?

This is another great creative writing prompt for sixth graders. They’ll have fun thinking about a talent they would like and what they would like to do with that talent.

4 Argumentative Writing Prompts for 6th Grade

Argumentative writing is another important skill for students to practice and develop. With argumentative writing, students must decide their opinion or position related to an issue and provide reasons that support their position. These reasons should be evidenced based, so research to find the support is often required.

You’ll find some of my favorite argumentative writing prompts to use with 6th grade students below.

Prompt: Which animal makes the best pet? Support your opinion with facts and examples.

I like this writing prompt for introducing students to argumentative writing. The topic of pets is something all students are familiar with, even if they don’t personally own a pet.

You can also use this topic to introduce students to providence factual reasons, versus opinions, to support their answers. For example, if students want to say that a cat is the best pet, a factual reason can’t be that cats are cute. However, they could say something like cats are the best pet because they do not have to be taken outside to go to the bathroom on a cold or rainy day.

2. Teaching Math in School

Prompt: Is it necessary to teach math in school? Why or why not?

I liked using this writing prompt with my 6th graders. Before I had students start, I took an initial poll by having the students raise their hands. Not surprisingly, a fair number of hands went up to vote against teaching math in school.

However, after we discussed the pros and cons of eliminating math instruction and students had to make their final decision before starting on their prompt, a lot of students changed their minds. It was encouraging to see them looking at the stronger reasons for leaving math in the curriculum and letting them outweigh their desire for ‘easier’ school.

3. Screen Time Limits

Prompt: Should parents place limits on how much screen time their children can have? Why or why not?

However, once they start thinking about reasons to limit screen time and examine evidence showing the impact of too much screen time on children, they may change their mind.

4. Conserving Energy

Prompt: What is the most important thing all households should be doing to conserve energy?

This writing prompt can pair nicely with a science unit on energy conservation. Clearly, there are a number of things that families can do to reduce their environmental impact.

However, for this writing prompt, students must decide which one thing is the most important and provide evidence to support their opinion.

Writing Standards for 6th Grade

Sixth graders will continue to build on the knowledge and skills they learned in elementary school. As the first of the middle school years, the writing expectations for sixth grade will be greater than those during the elementary school years.

Sixth grade is a critical year for students in regards to writing and other subject matters. They are transitioning from elementary school to the upper grades and will need the right supports to help them master the grade-level standards.

Below is an overview of the writing standards for 6th grade related to the writing process, writing purposes, writing evaluation, conventions, and research and inquiry.

Writing Process

Students should receive instruction and practice on each stage of the writing process. They should independently implement each of the stages when producing their own written work.

The stages of the writing process that sixth graders are expected to know and use include:

Writing Purposes

Sixth graders should be composing texts for a variety of purposes and intents. Many of these texts should be at least 500 to 700 words long.

Some of the different forms/intents that students should be writing about in sixth grade include:

• Research Reports
• Responses to Literature

Writing Evaluation

In sixth grade, students should practice evaluating and giving constructive feedback for another student’s wiring.

They should also begin evaluating their own work and identify their strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Then, they should use this information to set persona writing goals for improving their work.

Conventions

Below are some of the key convention skills that sixth graders should be proficient with:

• Sentence structure
• Capitalization
• Punctuation
• Cursive or manuscript

Research and Inquiry

Research and inquiry is another important standard for sixth graders to show proficiency with. By the end of the year, students should be able to:

• Compile information from multiple sources to complete a report
• Use graphic organizer to show prior knowledge about a subject
• Create a plan for research and take notes about a topic
• Create appropriate questions to research
• Choose appropriate and authoritative sources
• Locate relevant information from resources
• Summarize the information found from various sources
• Document and cite sources
• Understand and articulate the importance of avoiding plagiarism

Advantages of Writing Prompts at the Lessons

You may be wondering why you should use writing prompts with your sixth graders. There actually are a number of benefits associated with using writing prompts, some of which may surprise you.

A few of the benefits of using writing prompts during your writing instruction include:

• The ability to focus student writing on a specific form of writing (informative, narrative, expository, etc.).
• Giving students the opportunity to practice writing and strengthen their skills as a writer.
• Presenting students with engaging tasks and assignments.
• Helping us as teachers come up with new ideas to get our students interested and engaged.
• You can find many writing prompts online for free, which is always a benefit when you are a teacher.

Got to sub in 6th grade today, the predictions were coming fast and furious for today’s writing prompt. Got to love engaged students! pic.twitter.com/nBfzMxxP0T — Nick Jurrens (@NickJurrens) February 20, 2021

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Lesson 8.2: Critical Thinking and Creative Thinking

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• Page ID 10375

• Kelvin Seifert & Rosemary Sutton
• University of Manitoba & Cleveland State University via Global Text Project

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Critical thinking

Critical thinking requires skill at analyzing the reliability and validity of information, as well as the attitude or disposition to do so. The skill and attitude may be displayed with regard to a particular subject matter or topic, but in principle it can occur in any realm of knowledge (Halpern, 2003; Williams, Oliver, & Stockade, 2004). A critical thinker does not necessarily have a negative attitude in the everyday sense of constantly criticizing someone or something. Instead, he or she can be thought of as astute: the critical thinker asks key questions, evaluates the evidence for ideas, reasons for problems both logically and objectively, and expresses ideas and conclusions clearly and precisely. Last (but not least), the critical thinker can apply these habits of mind in more than one realm of life or knowledge.

With such a broad definition, it is not surprising that educators have suggested a variety of specific cognitive skills as contributing to critical thinking. In one study, for example, the researcher found how critical thinking can be reflected in regard to a published article was stimulated by annotation — writing questions and comments in the margins of the article (Liu, 2006). In this study, students were initially instructed in ways of annotating reading materials. Later, when the students completed additional readings for assignments, it was found that some students in fact used their annotation skills much more than others— some simply underlined passages, for example, with a highlighting pen. When essays written about the readings were later analyzed, the ones written by the annotators were found to be more well reasoned— more critically astute— than the essays written by the other students.

In another study, on the other hand, a researcher found that critical thinking can also involve oral discussion of personal issues or dilemmas (Hawkins, 2006). In this study, students were asked to verbally describe a recent, personal incident that disturbed them. Classmates then discussed the incident together in order to identify the precise reasons why the incident was disturbing, as well as the assumptions that the student made in describing the incident. The original student— the one who had first told the story— then used the results of the group discussion to frame a topic for a research essay. In one story of a troubling incident, a student told of a time when a store clerk has snubbed or rejected the student during a recent shopping errand. Through discussion, classmates decided that an assumption underlying the student's disturbance was her suspicion that she had been a victim of racial profiling based on her skin color. The student then used this idea as the basis for a research essay on the topic of "racial profiling in retail stores". The oral discussion thus stimulated critical thinking in the student and the classmates, but it also relied on their prior critical thinking skills at the same time.

Notice that in both of these research studies, as in others like them, what made the thinking "critical" was students' use of metacognition — strategies for thinking about thinking and for monitoring the success and quality of one's own thinking. This concept was discussed in Chapter 2 as a feature of constructivist views about learning. There we pointed out that when students acquire experience in building their own knowledge, they also become skilled both at knowing how they learn, and at knowing whether they have learned something well. These are two defining qualities of metacognition, but they are part of critical thinking as well. In fostering critical thinking, a teacher is really fostering a student's ability to construct or control his or her own thinking and to avoid being controlled by ideas unreflectively.

How best to teach critical thinking remains a matter of debate. One issue is whether to infuse critical skills into existing courses or to teach them through separate, free-standing units or courses. The first approach has the potential advantage of integrating critical thinking into students' entire educations. But it risks diluting students' understanding and use of critical thinking simply because critical thinking takes on a different form in each learning context. Its details and appearance vary among courses and teachers. The free-standing approach has the opposite qualities: it stands a better chance of being understood clearly and coherently, but at the cost of obscuring how it is related to other courses, tasks, and activities. This dilemma is the issue— again— of transfer , discussed in Chapter 2. Unfortunately, research to compare the different strategies for teaching critical thinking does not settle the matter. The research suggests simply that either infusion or free-standing approaches can work as long as it is implemented thoroughly and teachers are committed to the value of critical thinking (Halpern, 2003).

A related issue about teaching critical thinking is about deciding who needs to learn critical thinking skills the most. Should it be all students, or only some of them? Teaching all students seems the more democratic alternative and thus appropriate for educators. Surveys have found, however, that teachers sometimes favor teaching of critical thinking only to high-advantage students— the ones who already achieve well, who come from relatively high- income families, or (for high school students) who take courses intended for university entrance (Warburton & Torff, 2005). Presumably the rationale for this bias is that high- advantage students can benefit and/or understand and use critical thinking better than other students. Yet, there is little research evidence to support this idea, even if it were not ethically questionable. The study by Hawkins (2006) described above, for example, is that critical thinking was fostered even with students considered low-advantage.

Creative thinking

Creativity is the ability to make or do something new that is also useful or valued by others (Gardner, 1993). The "something" can be an object (like an essay or painting), a skill (like playing an instrument), or an action (like using a familiar tool in a new way). To be creative, the object, skill, or action cannot simply be bizarre or strange; it cannot be new without also being useful or valued, and not simply be the result of accident. If a person types letters at random that form a poem by chance, the result may be beautiful, but it would not be creative by the definition above. Viewed this way, creativity includes a wide range of human experience that many people, if not everyone, have had at some time or other (Kaufman & Baer, 2006). The experience is not restricted to a few geniuses, nor exclusive to specific fields or activities like art or the composing of music.

Especially important for teachers are two facts. The first is that an important form of creativity is creative thinking , the generation of ideas that are new as well as useful, productive, and appropriate. The second is that creative thinking can be stimulated by teachers' efforts. Teachers can, for example, encourage students' divergent thinking — ideas that are open-ended and that lead in many directions (Torrance, 1992; Kim, 2006). Divergent thinking is stimulated by open-ended questions— questions with many possible answers, such as the following:

• How many uses can you think of for a cup?
• Draw a picture that somehow incorporates all of these words: cat, fire engine, and banana.
• What is the most unusual use you can think of for a shoe?

Note that answering these questions creatively depends partly on having already acquired knowledge about the objects to which the questions refer. In this sense divergent thinking depends partly on its converse, convergent thinking , which is focused, logical reasoning about ideas and experiences that lead to specific answers. Up to a point, then, developing students' convergent thinking— as schoolwork often does by emphasizing mastery of content— facilitates students' divergent thinking indirectly, and hence also their creativity (Sternberg, 2003; Runco, 2004; Cropley, 2006). But carried to extremes, excessive emphasis on convergent thinking may discourage creativity.

Whether in school or out, creativity seems to flourish best when the creative activity is its own intrinsic reward, and a person is relatively unconcerned with what others think of the results. Whatever the activity— composing a song, writing an essay, organizing a party, or whatever— it is more likely to be creative if the creator focuses on and enjoys the activity in itself, and thinks relatively little about how others may evaluate the activity (Brophy, 2004). Unfortunately, encouraging students to ignore others' responses can sometimes pose a challenge for teachers. Not only is it the teachers' job to evaluate students' learning of particular ideas or skills, but also they have to do so within restricted time limits of a course or a school year. In spite of these constraints, though, creativity still can be encouraged in classrooms at least some of the time (Claxton, Edwards, & Scale-Constantinou, 2006). Suppose, for example, that students have to be assessed on their understanding and use of particular vocabulary. Testing their understanding may limit creative thinking; students will understandably focus their energies on learning "right" answers for the tests. But assessment does not have to happen constantly. There can also be times to encourage experimentation with vocabulary through writing poems, making word games, or in other thought-provoking ways. These activities are all potentially creative. To some extent, therefore, learning content and experimenting or playing with content can both find a place— in fact one of these activities can often support the other. We return to this point later in this chapter, when we discuss student-centered strategies of instruction, such as cooperative learning and play as a learning medium.

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