About this activity
Twelve prompts asking for a real story: tell about a time you felt proud; your best birthday; a time you were scared; a time you helped someone; your first day of school; a time you got hurt; a time you lost something; a time something didn't go your way. The last few are the useful ones — a prompt with a problem in it produces a story, and a prompt without one produces a description.
How to use it in a session
Pick the prompts with trouble in them. Tell about a fun trip produces a list; tell about a time something didn't go your way produces a complication, an attempt and a resolution, which is a story. Ask for a beginning, a middle and an end explicitly, and count them. Twelve minutes covers one narrative told twice, which is better than four told once.
What to listen for
Listen for the internal response. Students give the setting and the events reliably; how they felt about it is the element that goes missing and the one that turns a sequence into a narrative. Watch for stories that end without resolution — and then we went home is an ending in the sense of stopping rather than resolving.
Carrying it home
Dinner conversation is personal narrative. Asking for the best and worst part of the day, with a beginning and an end, is a routine some families already have and is exactly this task.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- First through fourth, for early narrative discourse.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all twelve prompts play with no account.
- Which prompt should I start with?
- One with a problem in it — a time you got hurt, or a time something didn't go your way. A prompt without trouble produces a description, and description does not exercise story structure.