Published in "The Literacy Coordinator" Autumn 2002.
Running writing workshops in the classroom - Telling Tales.
To some people there is nothing scarier than an empty sheet of paper- its blankness aptly reflecting the mind of the would-be writer. To others it's merely a vast canvass upon which they can't wait to start painting pictures with words. This is as true of a staff room full of teachers as it is for a class of children. The trick is to make it as easy for the reluctant writer to have-a-go as it is for the budding Dahl, Fine or Pullman. What follows are some suggested activities that can be tried out by teachers in an inset-workshop environment and then, once appropriately adapted, taken into class. You'll find that I have made no references to specific levels in SATs, the National Curriculum, The Literacy Strategy, strands or attainment targets - although all these activities could have such labels attached to them. It is my intention here to merely outline practical activities that have proved successful over the years - activities that can be adapted to suit the needs and levels of most children.
Tell me a story.
This activity makes the link between story telling and story writing and underlines the point behind redrafting.
This activity is done in pairs - a storyteller and a scribe. Get the storyteller to talk about something outrageous/humorous/scary/embarrassing that has happened to them either recently or when they were younger. It's the job of the scribe to get their partner's story down as close to word-for-word as possible. The aim is for the storyteller to see their voice on paper. Then let the storyteller take the text of their tale and re-read it with a view to seeing how they can make it more outrageous/ humorous/scary/embarrassing by changing words, removing unnecessary words or exaggerating events. It's a good idea to do these revisions in different colour ink to the original so the process of improving the text is more obvious. Then swap over roles so that the scribe becomes the storyteller.
The point here is that, no matter how incompetent we may think we are at writing, we are all storytellers. It's one of the unique defining human characteristics. The idea that writing is merely putting your voice onto paper and that redrafting is the act of refining those initial "spoken" words is a powerful one. Obviously there are practical considerations when taking this activity into the class, not least the confidence and competence of the scribe. But these can be overcome by pointing out that the initial act of putting the story teller's voice onto paper doesn't have to be super-neat and perfectly spelt - just readable and understandable. Alternatively teachers might want to choose competent writers to be scribes or even scribe themselves. You could even get children to tell their stories onto tape and do the redrafting work on the transcript. It's vital for children to see that the process of writing is as important as the finished article. To that end display the various drafts of the work so that the growth of the story from beginning to end is valued and not just the "good copy". (That's why editing in a different colour is a good idea!)
Attention grabbing beginnings.
I like to describe these activities as "How to get rid of the 'One days', 'Once upon a times', and the 'I went to the parks'! "Grab your reader by the throat on the first line, drag them through the story and don't let go until the last full stop!" (It's the best piece of advice anyone ever gave me and I was 10 at the time!) It's what teachers are always trying to get children to do and here are some was of doing it.
The first is very much like the "Tell me a story" activity above. If a child is stuck for a beginning, strike up a conversation with them about the event they are trying to write about. Write down the very first words they use to tell you the story and hand them the paper showing them their story beginning. Underline the fact that authors put their voices onto paper.
I like to call the next suggestion "Springboards".
Consider a swimming pool that can only be entered by the use of a diving board. Once you've dived in and began to swim around you no longer need the diving board - it can be taken away. Now view a story in a similar way. The water is the body of the story and prosaic beginnings such as "One day" can be seem as the springboard. They can be used as launch pads to get you into the story. Once you're swimming around in the words, so to speak, you no longer need the springboard, so rub it out or put a line through it. Invariably it leaves a more interesting start.
This next suggestion is really good for getting children to look at the structure and sequence of a story. Once a story as been written get the writer to sequence what happens in the story in the order they have written it.
For example -
- Go to park
- Play on swings
- Get chased by a poodle
- Dog rips seat out of trousers
- Run home
- Tell mum a crazed Alsatian nearly tore you limb from limb.
Then get them to experiment with writing story starters that refer to later events in the story.
For example -
"I screamed as the deadly teeth snapped within an inch of my bottom!"
"I slammed the front door and collapsed in the hallway, holding my tattered trousers in my hand, just glad to be alive!"
"It was huge, mum, honestly. A monster! I had to fend it off with sticks!"
Get the writer to see the start of a story as the appetiser - the bit that makes the reader eager to know what's going to happen next. Get them to try to induce a feeling of "what's going on here?" or "what's going to happen now?" If you've got your reader asking that, they're hooked! Once the teasing beginning has been written then the writer can return to the initial sequence of events, having laid that seed of curiosity in their reader's mind.
(A really good example of an attention grabbing beginning is Morris Gleitzman's "Bumface"!!!)
Using a book as a starting point.
The above two activities can be adapted to suit children in both key stage one and two. The following set of activities, based on a specific book, is directed at key stage one, although they can clearly be adapted for older children.
For the purposes of this article I am going to refer to activities I have developed in respect to one of my books (Baby Bear Comes Home, a Heinemann Blue Banana book, ISBN 0-7497-1828-5). But the ideas surrounding the work can be used in any book.
The story is about a bear that was accidentally left in a school and the twilight journey of mummy and daddy bear as they go to rescue him.
Simple retelling of a story - The child could simply retell the story concentrating on a beginning, middle and end. Encourage them to start the retelling with the problem (i.e. baby bear has been left in school), the adventures (i.e. what happened to the characters on their journey) and the outcome (i.e. how everything was resolved). With very young children it would be enough to retell the story verbally to a group. Older children could create a sequenced storyboard of what happened.
Telling the story from the point of view of a particular character - This is a simple technique that helps children to empathise with different characters in a story. Add added speech bubbles to images of the characters in the book each saying "I am owl/frog/the cat/ baby bear etc... This is what happened, this is what I saw." Then, either verbally to a group or written individually on paper, the child can tell the story from the particular character's perspective. Encourage them to write in the first person (I woke up and found that baby bear was missing - I tried to sit on the frog's back but it was very slippery). This is also a good opportunity for children to delve below the surface of a story. The lion character, for example, appears in the book in only one of the pictures and, at first glance, plays little part in the story. He is actually one of the classroom toys who keep baby bear happy while his parents are on their way. Getting the child to say what that particular character could have seen and done would involve making up what might have happened while the main action of the book was going on. The child would have to use what they know about the story and the characters to create the scene.
Make a story map - Mummy and daddy bear start the story under the girl's bed and end it, once they've rescued their cub, in the girl's bed. A fun group activity would be to make a flow-chart story map of the events in the book. But you don't have to stick rigidly to the story, this is a really good opportunity to ask lots of "what if" questions. What if the bears slipped off the frogs' backs? What if the classroom toys were holding baby bear for ransom? (Anything is possible when you're dealing with "what ifs"!!!)
Confessional Writing
This activity is aimed primarily at key stage two children. One of the main themes that run through the writers' workshops I set up in schools is the importance of using personal experience when writing. It's important to make the point that writers use real life events as starting points to stories and then exaggerate, fabricate and, well, lie! In fact story writing is the only subject in school where lying is positively encouraged! And the bigger the lie the better the story. It's really quite liberating for a child to be told that they can lie to their heart's content. But (and here's the crucial bit) we all know that for a lie to be effective it has to be believable. No matter how far fetched the plot may be, the reader has to buy into the world the author is creating. A story doesn't have to be true, but it has to believable.
To this end I like to encourage children to write "Confessional Stories". Ask the children (or your colleagues when doing the inset) to think of something that they know they shouldn't have done, but no one else found out. And it's even better when someone else got the blame and they said nothing! This could be a recent school-based event or a story from childhood. (Children particularly like writing stories about brothers and sisters. Sibling rivalry is riddled with potential confessional stories!)
Stress that when writers write they aren't telling a story to themselves. Diarists write for themselves, storywriters do so because they want to share their story with others. The point of writing is to elicit a reaction in your reader. Consequently it's important that children have a chance to have their stories reacted to. Allow the children to read each other's work and comment on it. Also, when teachers get round to marking the work, try to respond as a reader and not merely as a marking machine. If the author intended to write a scary story say how frightened you are. And if it didn't scare you, suggest how the author could make it scarier. I like to call this genre specific marking - using the intentions of the author as the main criteria for reacting to the work.
A game I like to play is called "Spot the lie". This can work between the teacher and child, between children and, of course, between colleagues. The task is to spot when the author has left the realms of personal experience and started to invent. But the trick is to fool the reader into believing the invention. It encapsulates the aim of every author - to convince his or her audience that a make-believe world is possible and plausible.
Character cards
An effective way of getting children to create interesting characters is to encourage them to ask themselves loads of questions about their characters. It's important to know as many tiny little details about your character as you can. Make them real. The more you know about your character the realer they will seem to your reader. To aid that I have devised another game called Character Cards. Once a character is created I encourage children to take the cards and, one by one, answer the questions on them in respect to the character. (Suggestions for the card contents are things like, what did your character have fro breakfast, what are they scared of, what hobbies do they have, what dark secrets do they have, why is there a fresh scar on their face.) It really doesn't matter if the detail that emerges in the answer is not used in the story. It's all part of the process of deepening the character and making them believable. When playing this game with children you should underline that it doesn't really matter how they respond to the question, but they can't say "I don't know" and the responses must be consistent within themselves. (For example, you can't say your character's favourite food is steak and kidney pie if they're meant to be a vegetarian!)
Publishing Houses in class
This final suggestion comes from a project I set up as a teacher - in about 8BNC (that's eight years before the introduction of the national Curriculum). Those of you who were teaching back then will remember that long lost luxury that can only be dreamt of nowadays - time! And although this suggestion does have more far reaching organizational implications to what's been suggested before, I think it's worth sharing because it worked really well!
I divided my class into groups of three and named each group after a publishing house (Penguin, HarperCollins, Walker etc). Each group member took on a specific role - author, editor and audience. They would rotate roles each fortnight. Each publishing house had to produce a different book every fortnight. I would provide the stimulus for the story, the "author" in each group would write a first draft and discuss it with the "editor" and together they would make a second draft. Then it would be given to the "audience" who would comment on it and finally, together with the "author" and "editor" produce a finished book that would then be placed in the ever-expanding class library! Each book also had a blank sheet of paper in the back for other readers in the class to write their reactions. The publishing house project lasted all year and proved extremely successful. It boosted the children's confidence, made them more independent writers and, most importantly, demonstrated that children respond well to constructive criticism from their peers - probably better than they do when it's coming from their teachers!
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