Creative writing - a detective play

This is a fun, accessible class allowing young students to engage with the mystery/detective genre. With lots of prompts it gives children the confidence to plan, write and act out mini detective plays!

It is a fun class, enabling students to explore their creative side with a step-by-step guide to creating a detective play. It can be used in a classroom setting, but also works well if you are running a creative writing or drama club or similar.

It is a relatively ‘light’ class in terms of academic content. It can (and has been!) enjoyed by students from age 7 up to about age 14 depending on ability and engagement levels. It creates a fun, lively atmosphere and moves very quickly through the different stages of planning, writing and acting.

The lesson is structured as follows:

a) Introduction to idea of detective plays. What is a play? What is a mystery? What is a detective? There is a short (very cheesy!) play for 4 children to read out to find out the answers to these questions.

b) Students are all given a ‘planning sheet’ (This is available to print out at the end of the powerpoint)

c) Planning 1 – what is going to be your MYSTERY? (There are lots of visual prompts)

d) Planning 2 – who is going to be your DETECTIVE? (Some discussion about how you can make them particularly interesting.)

e) Planning 3 – what is going to be your SETTING? (There is a brief child-friendly explanation about the concept of locked-room mysteries – NB that term is not used, just the concept!)

f) Dialogue – how do we present dialogue in a play?
g) Now students are given some time to write their plays. (This can be done individually, groups or pairs.)

h) You can also give students time to act out their plays to the group/class.

i) There is an additional optional activity which can be used for extension/homework – Can you turn the opening of ‘A Little Princess’ (text included) into a mystery play. What might happen next?

This is a fun class, which prompts student to think more about how we create mysteries and why we need interesting characters and dialogue in our stories.