Abstract
This classroom-based action research study examines how creative writing activities can be used to reveal middle school students' understanding of climate types in the Social Studies course. Grounded in writing-to-learn and process-oriented writing perspectives, the study explores how students externalize climate-related knowledge through written narratives and how these texts make visible their conceptual understandings, misconceptions, and patterns of reasoning. The study was conducted with 47 sixth-grade schoolchildren (approximately 11–12 years old) enrolled in a public middle school in Istanbul, Türkiye. Data were collected through curriculum-aligned creative writing tasks focused on five climate types and were supplemented by semi-structured interviews with 15 schoolchildren selected through maximum variation purposive sampling. The qualitative data were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis supported by five analytical dimensions: geographical space, clothing, animals, plants, and cause-and-effect reasoning. The findings suggest that students tended to produce richer and more concrete representations when writing about climate types that were more familiar to their lived or mediated experiences, particularly the Mediterranean and Desert climates. In contrast, their representations of less familiar climate types, such as the Polar and Monsoon climates, were more fragmented, superficial, and more prone to misconception. Across climate types, students' texts were often descriptive and conventional, whereas explanatory reasoning about human–environment relationships remained limited. Overall, the study suggests that creative writing may function as a useful diagnostic and interpretive pedagogical tool by making students’ climate-related thinking more visible and by helping teachers identify conceptual gaps that may inform future instruction in middle school Social Studies education.