This resource engages students by looking at a wide range of texts showing how to organise writing: the use of verbs, characters, settings and illustrations to create stories. Each theme looks at various types of text and encourages students to use their learned skills to understand and create stories of their own.

Module activities

Introductory activities

Story structure

• Select a picture book that the students are familiar with. Read the book to the students paying attention to both the text and the images. Discuss the story structure and the five elements that make a story: characters, setting, plot, conflict and resolution. Discuss how all of these components work together to tell the story. Ask the students to write down the five elements and identify them in relation to the book selected.

Illustrations

• Look at the illustrations and discuss whether the words and images are symmetrical interactions or enhancing interactions. Ask the students to draw a picture from the book and decide if the picture tells the same story as the words, or if the picture tells more of the story than the words.

Narrative

• Discuss narrative style and ask the students if the story that was read was written in first-person narrative, second-person narrative, third-person narrative or alternating-person narrative. It may be helpful to show students examples of each narrative style.

Book covers

• We are told that we should not judge a book by its cover, but we all do! Ask students to think about why a book cover is so important. Discuss what it is that a book cover does: such as telling the reader what the book is about, giving an example of the illustration style and setting the tone for the story inside the book. Explain what a synopsis is and ask students to write a synopsis for this book.

Concluding activities

• Organise a readathon within the class or year level. The challenge could be set up like a scavenger hunt with students challenged to find and read a range of books including fiction and non-fiction, and covering a range of topics.
  • At the end, collate a list of all the books that the participants managed to read.
• Provide the class with a framework for a story, including a location, a challenge and a resolution. As part of the story, the protagonists must split up to work towards the resolution.
  • In groups, have the class work together to finish the story by writing separate chapters from the point of view of a different character and relating how they contributed to the resolution.
  • Each group could be given a prompt they must incorporate into their story, which could be presented as a mystery to the other groups; for example, 'A loud roar was heard in the distance; it was too far away to know for sure, but it sounded like a dragon'. One group could then be prompted to incorporate a dragon into their part of the story.
  • Once everyone is finished, read the story as a class with a representative of each group reading their chapter.
• Choose a well-known fairytale or nursery rhyme and read it together as a class. Have the students rewrite the fairytale in the first person and update it for the modern world.
• Create a collage that depicts your school or classroom. Using a large picture frame, layer the collage to enforce perspective. Students can draw themselves doing various jobs around the classroom. Have them add themselves at the appropriate layer.
  • As a class, write a short story to accompany the collage.