Story Elements Classes

Earlier this month I had a great time running a class at the Lillington library for our homeschool group. We used fairy tales to discover the different elements of a story, and then we made our own as a class. Everyone had a blast!

This is our class story. If you can make my drawings out, I'll be impressed.

Then this week I took part of that lesson and used the same story-telling method to introduce our co-op class to elements of a story. They'll be using these new vocabulary words to play an awesome game, Create-a-Story, that the co-op has. As you play the game, players gather cards like "character" and on the other side of the card is a description of a character. You gather several of each type of card and once you reach the end of the board game, it's time to pick your favorite cards and write your story using an outline provided with the game. For the co-op, we divided the students into groups and each group is creating their own story. My group drew cards about pirates, treasure, and tornadoes... So much fun!

Earlier this year I also taught a class about the three-act story structure to middle and highschoolers at the Erwin library. I find the three-act structure helpful for understanding the "problem," "solution," and tension of a story on a deeper level, even when that story doesn't follow the model precisely. My favorite part during all of these classes is being privileged to talk with enthusiastic students who are very creative and excited to learn more. I'll also be doing a presentation on NaNoWriMo and encouraged my older students to look into that.

I'll be teaching more of these classes in the future. You can read about my classes here and connect with me through email or facebook.

PS. Another good tool for story telling are cubes like the Rory's Story Cubes