At Aim High’s Urban School campus, students are flexing their literary muscles and firing up their imaginations with a monster creative writing project. The seventh, eighth, and ninth grade Humanities classes were asked to think of the scariest monster they could imagine.  The students drew pictures of their monster and wrote an essay describing all of their monster’s evil attributes and terrifying characteristics.  The students then exchanged their essays with each other. The partner was asked to draw a picture based on the written description.  Evil clowns, shadow-monsters, and boogeymen were popular monster choices.  Chuckie, the Leprechaun and a few Cyclopses also made appearances for the spine-chilling fun. This expository writing assignment teaches students how to use figurative language and to “show, not tell” their subject matter.  The “monster project” activity was developed by Rebekah Caplan, author of Writers in Training and other writers’ craft books for middle school kids.