How to Integrate Creative Writing Across Subjects

Creative writing often takes a backseat in schools—confined mostly to ELA classrooms, and even there, used sparingly. But teachers like Ariel Sacks, a middle school teacher, author, and instructional coach, think this is a missed opportunity.

In a recent MiddleWeb article, Sacks notes that creative writing—whether it’s crafting fictional scenes, social media posts, songs, or poems—is often perceived as “less practical” than other forms of academic work. This perspective, she argues, overlooks a “tremendous developmental force.”

Injecting short, ungraded creative exercises into your curricula can be an effective way to “boost our students’ academic skills,” Sacks writes, before suggesting that these exercises can also increase empathy, lower stress levels, and encourage them to take productive risks.

Andrew Miller, associate director for social studies at the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction notes that when these writing exercises are used in subjects like math, science, or history they can also help students process recently learned material and synthesize their understanding in a way that will stimulate develop deeper comprehension and clearer thinking. 

After all, writing a short monologue from the perspective of a historical figure or a short scene exploring the relationship between an atom and a molecule requires students to “combine sources, ideas, etc. to solve problems, address an issue or make something new,” Miller says. Periodically deploying creative, imaginative writing activities like these is an excellent way to “model the thinking of synthesis in a low-stakes, scaffolding activity that [students] can translate into a more academic pursuit.” 

Some Ground Rules 

Before diving in, Sacks recommends considering some basic principles that can help lead to better participation and less administrative and grading work for teachers. 

1. Keep It Low-Stakes: If you’re not a writing teacher but see the value of creative writing activities in your subject, don’t grade for creativity or polish. Grade for completion—or don’t grade at all. This can help students focus on experimentation, play, and processing. 

2. Start Small: Sacks recommends quick activities that can be completed in the space of one class period: a short scene, a haiku, a funny song, or a letter, for example. 

3. Provide Just Enough Structure: Don’t go overboard with guidelines, opting instead for “just enough to get students going,” Sacks says. Give students a clear starting point in the form of a prompt, but create space for them to interpret, experiment, and make the work their own.

4. Create Time for Sharing and Reflection: Inviting students to share their work with peers or the class can help them articulate their choices, deepen their understanding of the content at the center of their creative process, and find more purpose in their work.

With these simple ground rules in place, here are some teacher-tested activities to try across subjects to spark creative thinking and deeper learning.

Play With Texts: When reading a novel in her ELA class, Sacks will sometimes “play with elements of the book” in small exercises such as asking students to create a new character, re-write a pivotal scene from a different point of view, or imagine a new ending or beginning, which can improve engagement with the text and deepen students’ understanding of character motivations, plot structure, and authorial choices.

Letter Writing: After students learn about concepts like photosynthesis in science class or the causes of the American Revolution in history, ask them to explain it in short, informal letters addressed to fun audiences like a fourth-grader, or an alien who has no knowledge of our planet. This playful exercise can challenge students to translate academic content into clear, accessible language, and perhaps “realize they didn’t quite understand what they thought they did,” says Woo-Kyoung Ahn, a psychology professor at Yale University.

Post Like a Character or Figure: Ask students to create short social media posts—tweets, Instagram captions, or Facebook posts, for example—from the point of view of a major figure they’re studying in history, or even the protagonist or antagonist of a novel or play they’re reading together. They might tweet like Alexander Hamilton during the Constitutional Convention, for example, or write an Instagram caption from the point of view of Lady MacBeth wrestling with guilt. The focus on brevity, concision, and using their own words to explain content can help students improve comprehension, become “active participants in their own learning” and lead to “deeper learning” that persists over time, a 2021 study suggests.  

Personify and Compare: Help students explore relationships between concepts and ideas by pitting their (fictional) personae against each other. In Tammy DeShaw’s classroom, for example, elementary school students take on the persona of a plant part (like a leaf, stem, or root) and write an email to another part explaining their role, requesting a vacation, or making a case for why they’re the “Most Important Plant Part.” DeShaw says students love the creative aspect of the activity, and it also gives her a chance to “evaluate whether they understand the parts and functions of the plant.” 

Poetry With a Purpose: Kenn Nesbitt, the former U.S. Children's Poet Laureate, says poetry exercises can enliven subjects you wouldn’t normally equate with creative writing, such as math. Both subjects, “rely on patterns, structure, and precise use of symbols to convey meaning. Both require creative thinking and problem-solving skills,” Nesbitt writes. Haikus about the concept of symmetry can help students reinforce vocabulary and deepen conceptual understanding. While “shape poems” that describe distinctive features of geometrical shapes in the form of that shape—a poem about triangles, for example that describes sharp angles and equal sides arranged in a triangular form to help students visualize and internalize the properties of a triangle—can help students “see mathematical ideas in a new way,” Nesbitt says.