Depending on teaching context and experience, your answer might be quite different to this:

Since teaching Scots creative writing is relatively new to me, I was initially apprehensive in choosing an appropriate text. However, I found the literature guidance, according to CfE level, at the Scottish Book Trust and Scots Language Centre, invaluable. Advice from more experienced teachers on the Scots Blether on Glow was also great. Nonetheless, finding a dialect appropriate text remained a bit tricky but I used this to my advantage to start a class discussion on vocabulary differences.

Although word walls and the hot seat game, mentioned on the course, are appropriate for Primary level, my class are older and therefore they really engaged with a Freewrite warmup using a combination of Scots and English.

With so many different writing ideas and a class with varied Scots ability, in keeping with the CfE creativity brief which emphasises the importance of choice, I gave my students several options to meet their appropriate CfE experiences and outcomes in writing. More advanced students wanted to use inferencing and summarising skills to translate the text into local dialect (my class are all from Aberdeenshire so some are confident Doric speakers). Since I want to do similar future work with translation, I felt that this was a good starting point. The rest of the class worked on introducing a new Scots character to the story. Although most pupils enjoyed their work, I took on too much and gave far too wide a choice. In the future I will offer differing levels of the same writing aspect such as character or setting.

Overall, teaching creative writing in Scots has pushed my own writing boundaries and I am enthusiastic that they will showcase great writing work at the forthcoming Scots exhibition that we are organising in the local community centre.

Return to Unit 5.