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Useful Websites related to this page
Places to find more
ways to start a short story:
Eight
Great Ways to Kick Off a Story
Sample sentences to get started. (Scholastic Magazine online)
Leon'sRandom
Generators
Stuck on a name for a
character, or a title for your story?
10 Ways to
Jump-Start Your Plot
Stuck on how to move the plot forward?
100
Story Starters
Starter sentences for writers.
Story
Starters
from
ThinkQuest
Many of these come from the Reading
Teacher Book of Lists.
Sites with tools for
digital storytelling:
StoryTools:
The
Fifty
Tools
50+ web tools you can use to create your own
web-based story (choose one or twoto explore).
Multimedia
Search
How to find images, audio, and video on the
Web.
Digital
Storytelling Resources for Educators
Resources for creating powerful digital stories.
Resources for
Very Young Learners
Storybird: Collaborative
Storytelling -
short stories that the students make collaboratively by selecting
pictures and themes. To read online or print as a book. Stories may be
kept private or shared with a URL. Includes a catalog of recent stories
as examples. (See Russell Stannard's Teacher Training Video on how
to use this tool.) Pictures are tageted to the young and very young
learner.
MessageHop
- Upload pictures, write text, and the program animates the message and
plays it as a sequence, then sends it to friends. Nice short
writing assignment or digital story-telling adventure. Recommended by
Russell Stannard (see the Teacher Training Video).
Smories - Another
safe site for
very young kids, here children have uploaded short videos of themselves
reading their own stories in videos. Good examples for students to use
in understanding voice, while practicing listening and speaking. At
the moment there is no way to upload your own smories, but the
functionality may
return. (See Stannard's Teaching
Training Video on this site.) You might try a similar idea with
adult learners and have them upload their videos to YouTube or a
podcast site.
With thanks to the Diigo
archive of Images4Education, an Electronic Village Online resource.
Join and contribute!
See the EVO
Video
Archive:
Slideshows
and
Digital Images
page for more resources. (Registration required.)
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Quicksteps to Writing a Short Story
The 5-Way Story Starter
Students love to write fiction, and the short story is a good way to
get them going. This page outlines a quickie lesson plan for writing a
short story using the 5-way story
starter, which plunges the reader (and the writer) into the
action quickly.
Target audience: low intermediate-advanced ESOL learners
What you need:
Pen and paper
What to do:
Place your students in groups of 5. Give each student in the group one
of the 5 major starting points to write individually:
1. a character (give him/her a name)
2. an action
3. a place or location
4. a time of day or night (and the weather)
5. a descriptive word describing a person (a character)
Now have the group work together to combine the list into one sentence.
They must also include one or more adjectives and one or more adverbs.
They may change any of the 5 elements to fit a good storyline, but they
can't eliminate any.
Students then write a short (3 pp.) story explaining how the character
got into the situation and how it was resolved.
Tips:
Write each starter on a separate slip of paper so that students can't
see each other's target word until they start to write the starter
sentence together.
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Ways to develop the story:
On a long piece of paper, the first student writes a follow-up sentence
to the story, then passes the paper on to the next student.
Students may also each write a sentence to follow-up to the starter,
and then choose the best one. They then continue writing 5 more
sentences, etc.
Have students read 10 Ways to
Jump-Start Your Plot. Each group decides which type of
continuation will best fit their starter.
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Follow-ups:
- Bring in a collection of short stories and have
students identify the 5 main points that start each one--usually they
will be found in the first sentence or two.
- Have students create digital illustrations for their
story and make a slideshow or video at one of the many digital
storytelling sites (good speaking/listening practice, too).
- Interview a character in the story to find out
his/her real motives. Record it on a podcast site, like PodOmatic.
- Act out the story for the rest of the class,
videotaping it and mounting it on the school website or at TeacherTube
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More ideas:
- Create a collection of pictures of landscapes cut from
magazines or newspapers as prompts for settings for your students'
stories. These might also be used for descriptive free-writing.
- Create another collection of interesting faces cut from
magazines or the newspapers. These might become the basis for
characters in your students' stories. Ask students first to describe
the people in these pictures. (Avoid stars or well-known faces.)
- Create a collection of abstract art pictures cut from
magazines or newspapers. Ask students to describe the mood or emotions
the pictures evoke. Learners often state that English can't express
emotion, but this may be because they have been given no opportunity to
learn this kind of vocabulary.
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Last updated 17
July 2011; copyright
Elizabeth
Hanson-Smith
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