BULLET POINTS:
Level: Any
Age: 7+
Group size: Any
Aim: To write a story together, and to learn how to use paragraphs
Skill: Writing
Grammar: —
Vocabulary: —
Length: 60+ minutes
Preparation time: A few minutes to copy the adequate story starters onto recycling sheets of paper
Materials: 5–10 sheets with a story starter (see below), pens, scissors, paperclips
Premise
If you teach in Italy, you may notice that Italian students don't tend to use paragraphs. Italian texts are segmented differently, and a blank line is never used to separate paragraphs. This is therefore worth teaching explicitly, since paragraphing is an important element of layout in any longer text.
Procedure
The activity itself is simple: put students into small groups. If you have, say, twelve students, divide them into two groups of six; with larger classes, use smaller groups of up to ten students each. Students sit in circles and each receives a sheet with a different story starter (the same set of story starters is given to every group). They add one more sentence to the story and pass it to the student on their right. They then receive a new story and add a sentence to that one too. After one full round, every story will have at least six sentences. If time allows, you can run a second round with the same stories, this time asking the last student in each round to bring the story to a close.
Depending on the level of the class, you can work with simple stories in the past simple (A1), then introduce further narrative tenses such as the past continuous (A2) and past perfect (B1), while at higher levels (B2+) you can add idioms, phrasal verbs or reporting verbs.
I found these excellent story starters from Creative Writing Now:
- He should have never let her into the apartment…
- It sounded like violin music, and it was coming from the basement…
- "It's not what you think," he said.
- I crouched behind the car, trying not to make a sound…
- There's only one thing in the world I'm afraid of…
- They sat next to each other on the train, still pretending to be strangers…
- I knew he'd been there because he'd stubbed out his cigarette in the sink…
- "Don't you dare come any closer…"
- She'd imagined this moment so many times, but she never expected…
- At first, I thought it was the cat, but it was…
- Inside the envelope was a four-leaf clover…
- There was only one way to keep her quiet, and it was going to cost us…
For lower levels, use story starters such as these:
- I opened the door and…
- That day was a bad day from the moment I woke up…
- "Why me?" I asked myself…
- That can't be true…
- She's the best mother/father/teacher/friend I've ever known…
- Why is… my favourite season? Because…
- It was dark and raining, and I was driving home…
- Just a perfect day: the sun was shining, and…
- When I grow up, I will definitely…
- Everybody liked him, but he had a secret:…
- Before I go to school/work,…
Allow a maximum of thirty minutes for this exercise. Play some background music while students write, and encourage team members to help each other — but only in English.
Once the groups have finished, ask the students to cut the last story they're holding into individual sentences and hold them together with a paperclip. Ask one student from each group to collect their group's cut-up story and swap it with another group's spokesperson. The groups then have to reconstruct the story and divide it into paragraphs (on the floor or on the desks). This should take a further twenty minutes.
Once the stories have been reorganised on the floor or desks, the group that originally wrote each story can check whether it's been reconstructed correctly. Once they've confirmed the order of the sentences, they should give the story a title and read it aloud to the whole class. The class then decides whether to nominate the story for a final award, choosing a maximum of five stories overall. This step should take about ten minutes.
The five shortlisted stories should then be placed on the teacher's desk and analysed together for paragraphing. Alternatively, you can pin the paper slips to the board or wall and mark where a blank line should go. This is a good opportunity to discuss with the class why we use paragraphs — to separate ideas. Finally, students can vote for their favourite story. This final step should take another ten minutes.
Naturally, these timings work best with a medium-sized group (12–15 students). With a larger class, you'll need to adjust the timing accordingly.
If you're fortunate enough to be working in a multimedia room, running an online course, or have laptops or tablets available, the whole lesson can be adapted to screen — shared instantly on a platform, even via Zoom or another video-chat programme, and read and analysed together as a class.
N.B. If your students include dialogue in their stories, take the opportunity to discuss punctuation too. I found this Masterclass for creative writers very useful.
If you want to skip some steps and save time, you can use these learning resources aiming at story reconstruction.