Storytelling

I believe storytelling is a lost art. I don't think even families share stories with each other anymore, the way they used to. And certainly people who can't look up from their phones and ipads are not telling stories.

We tell stories every day in my classroom and I think it is making my students better writers! We do it several ways. I have a Storytelling Workstation that has picture cards showing characters (grandma, a dog, a surfer, a teacher, etc.), places and activities. They choose one of each and then make up a story to tell their partner. We focus on having a problem and solution as well as a beginning, middle and end.

We also do it in our whole group reading. I show them a photograph (most of my photos I get from the archives of MSNBC's This Week in Pictures-- http://www.nbcnews.com/news/week-in-pictures ). So this is an example:

I choose random students to begin the story, continue the story and then come up with an ending to the story. They come up with some wild ones sometimes! :)

I work in Texas and we don't subscribe to common core. We used to have all these objectives for oral language development. We don't anymore, but I pretend we still do! I find other ways to fit in to our program because I really believe that it's an important skill that can then translate into how they write stories.