Adventures in Fantasy

Book excerpt: Adventures in Fantasy offers an exciting approach to teaching narrative and descriptive writing that stimulates a student’s creativity and imagination. Filled with mini-lessons, reading projects, and hands-on writing activities, the book shows teachers step-by-step how to introduce students to the “magic” of creating a complete story in the fantasy/adventure genre. Before fleshing out their stories, however, students are asked to construct actual maps of their ‘fantasyland’ – and then to write a travelogue describing the setting in vivid detail. This initial fantasizing encourages students to be wildly inventive in creating the drama, ogres, villains, heroes and heroines featured in their story, and on the way they learn about the mythic journey.