Storytelling has always been important when introducing reading and new language to children. It helps foster an positive relationship with the language, and between the teacher and students. Story writing can be equally as important but much harder to do in a YL classroom. Encouraging students to access their creativity and create a story which is logical, has the typical beginning, middle and end, and makes sense grammatically can be difficult in a low-level classroom. I had a spare lesson coming up the end of the year with an A1 level age 7 – 9 class and decided to experiment with a collaborative story-writing lesson. Super communicative and super fun, my students loved having so much creative freedom and eventually came up with some really funny stories, so I thought I’d share it 🙂

Step one

Introduce the topic of story writing by having the student read a story. I took a story from the textbook about a horse named Suzy and her friends. The story had pictures next to each paragraph (usually 2 or 3 sentences), I cut them up and in pairs, the students had to read the sentences and match them to the correct picture using vocabulary clues.

Step two

Once the students were finished they had to walk around the classroom, read the story in their books and check to see if all the pairings were correct. If they weren’t correct they were able to to change them.

Step three

I asked the students a selection of questions to elicit the structure of the story. Every time I asked a question, I wrote it on the board for later.

Step four

With the above questions answered about the textbook story, I put the students into 2 groups (4 students in each group). To get them engaged with the idea of writing a story, I told them that the textbook story was boring and rubbish. I said there were no magic, no zombies, no ninjas, no unicorns basically anything that I knew they were interested in. I then instructed them to think of a name and a ‘thing’ (I try to stay away from metalanguage so didn’t use noun). This gave us Janusz the Magic Yoghurt and Amy the Unicorn.

Step five

In their groups and with the names now chosen, the students were tasked with thinking about their own stories in their groups. I told them not to write anything down but to just to answer the questions one by one in their groups. After about 5 – 10 minutes of discussions (where I monitored and asked extra follow up questions if the students were struggling to think of ideas) it was time to write the sentences on the board.

Step six

Writing time! One by one I asked each group the questions working down the list. The students told me what their answer were and one student wrote the sentence on the board. Although only one student wrote the sentence the other students helped their partner by telling them what to write and how to write it, especially spelling. This meant that all the students were repeating the sentences over again, attempting to peer correct and improving each other’s language. Each sentence was written by a different student sin the group.

Step seven

The final product!

Once both stories were on the board, we did some whole class error correction (the above pictures were taken before the corrections) where the students read through the stories once more and corrected any mistakes. The students then copied it down into their notebook.

This was by no means a perfect lesson and I’m sure the next time I do a collaborative writing session with my YLs I’ll do something slightly different, but I’m really happy with what my students produced and how well they worked with each other.

Hopefully you too will find this useful 🙂

NB: Although this lesson was done with YLs, it can be very easily adapted to an adult or teen class as long as their level is equally as low and the topic of the story is relevant and appropriate.