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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 3 May 2017; copyright Elizabeth
Hanson-Smith, Computers for Education
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