Hands up if you have your child is a reluctant writer (I'm putting my hand up at this point). Hands up if you have difficulty inspring them just to start writing because inspiration is not there (again my hand is up). Hands up if the thought of creative writing with your child makes you want to hide under the covers and cancel school for the day just to avoid it (I think you can probably guess my hand is up again). In our house we have found a great solution for our 12 year old son Chipman.
It's called Storycubes. The box of Storycubes consists of 9 dice with a different picture on each side. You can get them online although we bought ours from our local bookshop. It's like writing is fun all of a sudden, throwing dice and taking it in turns to make up tales is more interesting than just being given a subject to write about or being told to write a story. Once the dice are thrown it's up to the thrower to decide what order they go and how the story will end.
When we first started using Storycubes we didn't write anything down. We would throw the dice and tell our stories, once Chipman was comfortable with this we started taking photo's of the cubes and I would scribe the story and then stick the photo onto the page as a reminder.
The next stage was for him to copy out what I had scribed. We took a while to get to the pen stage, letting Chipman get used to the story telling and imagination processe first. This week I will be adding challenges by looking at story structure. This week we will be looking at endings, Chipman will be challenged to try out a different ending for each story he makes up. We are using TES resources (free to sign up, everyone loves free!) for the structure ideas but you could make up your own.
Once we have worked on structure, we will be working on length. Chipman's stories are typically a paragraph long with the bare minimum detail require to get his point across. The plan is to start increasing slowly so that they are more descriptive and encourage him to use longer conversations and build more atmosphere.
Once we have that mastered all of the above the idea will be for him to plan his story out using this planning grid, placing the cubes and making notes in each relevant section before he writes the story out on his own. He wants to make a book of his Storycubes stories, complete with his own drawings, for his cousin as a Christmas gift, so I am hoping we are at this stage by then! I am so excited to see that Chipman not only picks up a pen because I have told him he needs to, but is actually enjoying it and setting his own goals. As we are only half way through my master plan I cannot tell you how well it will all work but I am hoping it will all go smoothly and I won't be hiding under the covers!We have gone from having a pen phobic writer that came out in a cold sweat or grumpy mood at the mere mention of writing a story, to one who wants to write his own book of short stories! Storycubes really have been an invaluable resource for us and I hope that my ramblings and Storycubes can be useful to your family too!
