Three simple and fun storymaking ideas to create stories with your students
Last week I had the chance to host a Storymaking workshop with my storytelling teacher and dear friend David Heathfield. We had a wonderful time with an enthusiastic group of teachers and storytellers from all over the world, creating stories, laughing and experimenting together, learning about the power of storymaking.
During the planning stage of the workshop, I thought of so many activities I tried during the years… it was such a long list! But of course, I had to choose and select just a couple of activities for the workshop, and leave out so many others that I love. So I thought… why not write an article for my blog with a couple more ideas?
In this article you will find three simple and fun ideas to create stories with your students (or with an audience or group of friends, because… why not? It’s so much fun!) – I’ve selected these three because they are all very different from one another, they can be adapted to different ages (and levels, if you teach in a language learning context) and they are not one-off activities, but they can be repeated more than once with the same group.
(PS: I’m also working on a booklet with many more ideas than the ones I can share in a blog post, so, if you’re interested, let me know and I’ll notify you when it’s ready!)
But, before we begin, why is it important to create stories with our students? In two words: DEVELOPING CREATIVITY!
Stories get us thinking, they get us to imagine different worlds and different possibilities, they introduce us to new concepts and new ideas, they teach us something, stories introduce problems and get us to imagine the solutions.
Even nowadays, concepts like critical thinking and problem solving are praised and researched, and what better (and fun, and engaging, and wonderful) way of working on developing these skills than using and creating stories?
So, without further ado, here are the three activities – I hope you’ll find them useful and will be inspired to try them out (I’d love to hear how they work for you, if you do!).
Fortunately, Unfortunately
Let’s start with an activity that probably many of you are already familiar with: “Fortunately, Unfortunately”. This activity has its roots in the fact that good stories are made of ups and downs, of problems and solutions: we suffer with the characters when they are struggling, and we rejoice for them when they get out of a difficult situation.
This activity is based on the same principle: alternating ups and downs to create narrative tension and relief. In my humble opinion, this is a wonderful activity to teach our students about this simple narrative strategy. Another reason why I love this activity is that it can be adapted to different contexts so easily: you can do it with a large group, as well as in pairs, and it’s usually so much fun for everyone, even for shyer students.
Let’s now look at an example of how this activity could work. Let’s imagine, for the sake of the explanation, that you’re doing this activity in pairs:
1. Tell your students that you’re going to create a story and divide them into pairs, then divide them into As and Bs.
2. Tell the As that they must be very positive, always look at the bright side of things and find solutions; tell the Bs that instead they must be very negative, always look at the dark side of things and find problems to every solution. Then introduce the concept of “Fortunately, Unfortunately”.
3. Give a starting sentence to the students: this must include a setting, the name of the characters and a problem. If you’re working with a group, I usually like to give the same starting sentence to everyone and to then have fun seeing how different or similar the stories they created were.
4. Tell your students that the story will start with something positive, so the As will be the first ones to add a sentence to the story, then it’s going to be Bs’ turn and they are going to alternate. Each of them is going to add one sentence to the story – if it’s easier for them, they can start with ‘fortunately’ or ‘unfortunately’, but you can also use this occasion to have them work with different conjunctions or adverbs that express the same concepts. I usually tell my students that they can go anywhere they want with their stories and they can be as creative as they like, but that there is one simple rule they need to follow: they mustn’t kill their characters! If you don’t use this rule, or if you do but the students forget about it, don’t worry: students are always so creative if we give them space to be so… there will be magical resurrections scattered throughout the stories!
5. If I’m working with a group and can’t monitor everyone at the same time, I usually set a timer and ask my students to come to a conclusion for the story when time is running out (REMEMBER! Allow time for your students to end the story without rushing – so, for example, if you give them 10 minutes, alert them when there are at least 2 minutes left).
Here is an example of the beginning of an exchange:
Prompt: Mike and Lucy were walking in the forest, they were lost and it was getting dark. They were scared, tired and hungry… but fortunately…
A: Fortunately, they saw a light in the distance – a house! They ran towards it.
B: But unfortunately, when they reached the house, they saw that it was the house of a witch, who was looking outside the window with a hungry expression.
A: But fortunately, the witch was blind and she couldn’t see them, so they ran and hid behind a tree.
B: But unfortunately, the witch had a talking cat, who told her that there were two plump kids outside.
A: But fortunately …
There are many variations to this activity and wonderful follow-ups, which I will add in the booklet I mentioned before!
What’s in the box (adapted from an activity by Andrew Wright)
Before I start talking about this activity, I’d like to acknowledge and thank storyteller, teacher and teacher trainer Andrew Wright (who we interviewed for the podcast, you can listen here) for his wonderful ideas on how to teach through stories and how to create stories – he’s a wonderful inspiration and the starting point of the activity I’m going to describe now is an activity I learnt from him.
In this activity, we are going to use mimes, gestures and facial expression to communicate the central point of the story to then move back and forward in the story-line. Compared to the previous activity, during this one the teacher/storyteller has more control over what the story is going to be about, but we must try to let the students do the thinking, without stirring the story too much in the direction we want it to go in.
As with every activity, there are many different ways to go about this one. For the sake of the explanation, imagine this time that, while doing this activity, you also want to work on the skill of note-taking, and you’re going to ask your students to jot down some ideas. Here is an example of how we could structure the activity:
1. In this first stage, the teacher/storyteller mimes the central point of the story and decides the mood of the story and some details (eg. Emotions, reactions, follow-up actions…) – I usually like to do this activity while sitting in a circle on the floor: Mime holding a box in your hands and opening it (how are you going to open it? Is the lid heavy or easy to open?). Look inside, react (are you surprised, happy, scared…?). Take what you find in your hands and hold it, move it and use it, then put it back in the box. Close the box and mime putting it on the floor.
2. Ask your students to work in pairs, to try to remember the actions you did and to write down what they think happened and what they think was inside the box. Tell them that they don’t need to write a complete story, but just to write down some notes (this will be very important later, as they will not be so tempted to read out what they wrote, but instead they will use their own words to talk about their ideas).
3. Tell the students that what they have just seen and worked on is the central part of a story and that you need their help to know what happened before and after that. Start asking leading questions and allow time for the students to talk in their pairs and take some notes – you can be as creative as you want when thinking about these questions, some examples could be:
a. Where did you find the box?
b. Why were you in that place?
c. How did you feel when you found the box? Why?
d. Why did you put the object you found back in the box?
e. What did you do with the box after you closed it?
4. Ask your students to practise telling the story they have created in pairs and then change pairs and get the students to tell their stories and listen to different ones: how are the stories similar? How are they different? Did they all imagine the same thing when you opened the box and played with the object you found there? If you’re working with a large group, you can repeat this stage multiple times: the students will get better with each telling of their story and they can listen to multiple versions of it from the others.
One thing I really like about this activity is the starting point with the mimes – I LOVE mimes, and I think that they are sometimes overlooked. If you wanted, you could ask your students to tell their stories to the new partners by miming what they came up with and see how their new partners interpret the different mimes. It’s so much fun!
To re-use this activity with the same group of students, simply change something in the way you mime the box part, or change the box with a suitcase, a bag, a room…
Guess the folktale
There are so many wonderful folktales from all over the world out there, there’s a real cornucopia of tales (any reference to the word ‘cornucopia’ here is purely random, or is it?) – so why not combine storytelling with storymaking? If you’re reading this blog post, you probably already know that I’m a teacher, a storyteller and… a storytelling teacher: this means that I use stories and storytelling techniques and activities during my lessons. A big chunk of the stories I use are tales from the oral tradition and I tell stories from all over the world: fairy tales, myths, legends… some of them are popular and universal stories, like Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Jack and the Beanstalk, and so on; but so many of them are new stories for my students – and these are the stories that we need to use for this activity.
DISCLAIMER: I’d like to specify here that, although this activity is adaptable to different levels and ages, I find that it works best when students are already familiar with using stories and storytelling activities during their lessons.
For the sake of the explanation, let’s imagine that we’re doing this activity with a small group of 6 students (of course, this activity can also be done in pairs, individually or with a bigger group - you can use a single story instead of two, or more than two and repeat some parts of the activity multiple times). Here is how it can be structured:
1. Divide the students in two groups. Ask the two groups to sit as distant as they can from each other and not to shout, so as not to be overheard from the others.
2. Give a different story to the two groups (this can also be done at home as homework in preparation for the lesson if you don’t have enough time during the session, but I usually find it better to do it on the day of the activity to avoid problems with absent students), you can do this in different ways: by giving them a recording or a video of yourself/another storyteller telling the story, by giving them a text with the story to read, by giving them a summary or scheme of the story…
3. Depending on the level and age of your students, and on the length of the stories, ask your students to divide the story in parts and to create a number of drawings to represent it. I usually ask my students to draw the various parts on A5 pieces of paper, as I think that it’s easier for the follow-up activity.
4. The two groups exchange the drawings in random order. Each group now has drawings for a story they don’t know: they must try to interpret what is happening in the pictures, put them in the order they think is correct and then create a narrative that links the pictures.
5. Create pairs with a member from each group: students take turns to tell the story they made up through the drawings and re-tell the ‘real’ story. For example, the turns could be organised as follows:
a. A tells B’s story to B
b. B tells B’s story to A
c. B tells A’s story to A
d. A tells A’s story to B
6. Ask your students to go back to their original groups and to discuss how much of the original story they had guessed through the drawings and how much they had missed – older students can be asked to discuss which story they like best and what led them to make different choices for their story compared to the original one.
As a follow-up to this storymaking activity, you can keep working on the two folktales you introduced here: get your students to re-tell the stories, imagine some of the dialogues in them… be creative, and have fun!
