D is for developing a story: Building Skills

My son had an interesting conversation with me about how to teach people to think. It included a discussion on creating a line of questions that leads to an answer or course of action. He's quite smart. However, he said this is a very challenging skill and that knowing how to develop a line of thought for a story or research article is a critical skill. Therefore, I am including a conversation on building skills that includes how to use questions to develop a story as well as other strategies.

A story has to have a clear beginning, middle and end. When I have a child write a story, I also ask them to answer as many questions as they can as they write. To start with, there is a who, what, where, why, when and how to be told. Sometimes it is not told directly but clues are given as in a mystery where the reader is left to discover the answers, but most of the time we expect the answers to those questions to be upfront. It makes a difference to the interest of the reader whether the story takes place in downtown Toronto, on a remote imaginary island or in Ancient Greece. A book about a child with a rare syndrome would have, perhaps, a different audience than a book about a spy or an Olympic athlete. The details matter.

I. Developing a story, in early stages, is being able to tell a series of events in a logical order. If you have a young child, work on this skill. 

1.Perhaps start with a rhyme like "Five Little Ducks" and have five toy ducks out. Can they tell the story by removing a duck each time you complete a verse? 

2.A step up might be to have four to eight pictures from a book you read and put them in order to retell the story in the book. Did they get the order right? Could they add in any more details? 

3.Another activity is to do a timeline. It could be their story or putting historical events in order or ordering the steps to make pancakes. The key is understanding what is logical.

II. Then children need to learn to put words together, then sentences, then paragraphs to build their story. 

A.Try a game where a group of people take turns adding one sentence to add to the sentences that came before to create a story that makes sense.

B. A more complicated version of this is to draw a card with a picture on it and to have to find a way to incorporate that item on the card into the story that is being told. That version can go crazy!

C. Another way to work on this skill might be to have puppets out and puppet one can start asking questions of the other puppet in a way that helps the other puppet develop a story. Perhaps they ask about the events of their day or about their favourite sport or fashion designer. In the end, the puppet has shared an interesting story with others.

III. To further develop a story, children need to edit their stories to add and remove details to make it more powerful and effective. 

i. Early on, pair adjectives with nouns. red+rose, scholarly+article, shallow+waters, tiny+mouse to teach them about being descriptive. 

ii. Play games that build this skill too. An example is I Spy. "I spy something that is soft. It is gray. It has a long tail...Yes, it's your cat!

iii. Cross out words that don't add value to the sentence/story. "The big, large man ate a bologna meat sandwich." An early skill is "Which one of these doesn't belong?" and they cross out 1 of 3 items that doesn't fit the grouping (fork, spoon, dog)

iv. Build more advanced sentences. If they wrote, "The pretty princess lived in a nice castle." They did okay. They had two adjectives to help draw a clearer picture of the who and where of the story. However, I would challenge them to paint an even more vivid picture. For example, "The prettiest princess in all the land lived in an ancient hilltop castle surrounded by rose gardens." 

There are extensive ways to build a child's skills in developing a story. These are just a few ideas to get you thinking about this important subject. In the process of teaching and learning, I highly recommend you find a way to make it all fun. Stories share facts and add to one's knowledge but also have entertainment value so don't be shy to make this experience enjoyable to everyone participating.