Weekly Workshop Lesson 5
This post may contain affiliate links. Thanks for your support!
Welcome to Weekly Workshop Lesson 5.
By now your writers ought to be getting to know the other writers in the group. It’s fun to see the students eager to share and eager to hear each others writing.
Today we will play with phrases and storytelling.
Time to spin some tales!
Writing Quest- Story Cubes
Story Cubes and Story Dice are nothing but a good time.
The tangible symbols of story potential, you can find them at local stores and Amazon.
If you don’t have any Story Cubes, you can sub in pictures. Lots of different sorts of pictures. You might even be strategic about choosing the pictures depending on how you want to play the game.
There are a few ways to use the cubes with players and I will list a few here:
- Take all the cubes you have and roll them– take turns going around in a circle, grabbing a cube with its face up and starting and adding to a story. This is a fun way to play with a big or small group of kids. You end the story when the cubes are gone.
- Choose a genre– of cubes and play only with those.
- Split the group– if you have many kids, split the group so they can play out shorter stories. It will help to keep time.
Story Time Dice are a little different. You are given a different categories of dice. You can roll the:
- Heroes
- Tools
- Villains
- Settings
- Obstacles
- Twists
- Endings
There are three types of Story Time Dice. You can enjoy Scary Tales, Fairy Tales, and the original set. They have game directions using all three or just one at a time. This game is a little like role playing because you roll for your hero, villain, tools, obstacles, and settings and then roll for the twists and the endings.
There are variations on these as well with different parameters.
These extra rules can be helpful to kids or they can stifle the creativity. It depends on your group!
The value in playing with story cubes and dice as prompts for storytelling is in the spontaneity and collaborative effort.
It’s good for the story teller in our writers.
Workshop Prompt- Fragments of Your Imagination
This activity is another that helps us to play with words.
It might seem silly to spend so much time with word play, but in the long run it offers our students more resources when it’s time to write.
I don’t remember many words I was taught in vocabulary classes.
I’m remember and use the ones that were memorable or that I encountered a lot and in different ways.
Here’s how Fragments of Your Imagination works:
- Download your Fragments of Your Imagination or make up your own!
- Cut the phrases into strips if you’d like a hands on approach.
- Or leave them on the chart provided
- Choose fragments to work with and make sentences with them.
- Students can make a whole short story or a small essay or a quick scene with one more more phrases.
- Share them with the group.
- Choose some for your favorite words or golden lines and add them to your notebooks.
- You can make up your own sentence fragments as well- maybe your students already have favorite phrases or golden lines they want to work with.
The idea here is to enjoy the sentence fragments and the images they conjure for us. Play with them and see what comes of it!
Workshop Share Time
Ideas for sharing with your group this week:
- Share your Found Poems– I would love to see these in the FB group as well! What fun to create poems out of your favorite titles.
- Story Time Cubes– Obviously some of the sharing time will come with today’s Writing Quest of telling stories.
- Golden Lines– I find these all the time when I read and listen to books. Ask your students if they have any to share each week.
- Fragments of Your Imagination– What did you do with the phrases you were given? My guess is you will have students who want to share their stories!
- Something New– This can be any piece students want to share that are not happening as part of the workshop. We always had new things to hear and students looked forward to hearing from each other each week.
As a reminder, making sure that workshop time is a safe place to share is the role of the facilitator. This is a big job if you want those reluctant to participate to engage with the group. Here are a few rules for engagement during Share Time:
- Only one reader at a time
- When students aren’t reading, they are the listening audience
- Teach feedback language to the listeners
- Encourage specific feedback for the writer- “I liked this moment in the story because…” is better than, “It was a fun story!”
- Share a golden line you’ve heard while listening- even jot it down if it’s something you want to remember. You’d be surprised at how many you can hear when you are listening for them.
- Early on you might stick with positive feedback.
- Add in suggestions for the writer later on when participants know each other better and are ready to give good feedback in this way and the writers are ready to hear it.
- Make a poster with suggested feedback- I pull it out when it’s time and go over it every workshop as we begin.
- Clapping is allowed!
- Ask questions- listeners can ask questions of the writer and often this lets the writer know what isn’t clear or what listeners enjoy.
As the facilitator, you may need to model this for your group as you first start out. Then I like to take a back seat and only interject with clarifications and encouragement when it’s needed.
Story Ideas Take Home Assignment
Writers almost always have ideas floating around for loads of stories. Sometimes they flesh them out and write them and others never get written. It might be because they don’t have the time or they lack confidence.
This week’s take home assignment is to write down your story ideas!
- Choose a story idea or two to elaborate on
- Give as many details as you’d like
- Discuss setting, characters, plot, etc
- Share ideas next week
- And make plans to start writing that story!
Join our Weekly Workshop Facebook Group to see what other groups are working on and to see writing samples from participants.