Story Starters Teacher's Guide

Scholastic Story Starters are a quick, fun way to inspire students to write.

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Ready to get students excited about writing? Scholastic Story Starters serves up hundreds of creative combinations that take the writer’s block out of creative writing for students in grades 1–4.

Set young writers loose with prompts that focus on character (who the story is about), plot (what happens in the story), and setting (where or when the story happens).

OBJECTIVES
Students will:

1. Discuss and identify what makes a story compelling. They may reflect on their favorite stories and what elements work together to create powerful tales. These may include:

• strong characters
• exciting action
• a surprising plot
• details about a place you’ve never been

2. Generate story starters that inspire. Students can produce prompts using the Spin lever or adjust one piece of the prompt at a time with the Spin This Wheel buttons.

3. Write a short creative writing piece. Students may choose to use the notebook, letter, newspaper, or postcard templates for their writing and may choose to include a drawing with their story. When students print their work, they are rewarded with a brief animation.

IDEAS FOR USING THIS ACTIVITY
Scholastic Story Starters is an ideal computer lab activity because it can be easily modified to fit a short amount of time or a longer period, is highly engaging for students, and sharpens essential student writing skills. Here are a few ideas for using this activity with your class:

1. In younger grades, work on the story collaboratively as a class. Ask students to supply such details as:

• How does the main character look and act?
• What happens in the beginning, middle, and end of this story?
• What words or phrases describe where the story takes place?

2. Generate a new story starter each day, make copies and distribute or ask students to record the starter in their notebooks. Have students free write for 10 minutes using the prompt as a starting point. Students may volunteer to share their writing with the class.

3. Print several story starter templates. Break students up into small groups and distribute one starter to each student. Each student writes the first two lines of their story. Encourage students to write in an open-ended way that invites the addition of new plot points and story details. After writing two sentences, each student passes their sheet one to the left. Then, students add two sentences to their new story, and so on. Once small groups have completed several short stories, ask each group to share their favorite one by reading it aloud to the class.

4. For more advanced writers, have each student create a Story Starters anthology. Ask students to generate and print several (3-5) story starter prompt pages. Then, challenge them to consider their starters as chapters in a book that need to be strung together to make up a larger plot. Students may arrange their starters in any order and should feel free to introduce new characters and details to establish a world where their story starters coexist.

5. Once students have explored the Story Starter machine and have completed their own stories online, create your own class set of story starters. First, dissect and discuss the structure of the Scholastic Story Starters:

• Action directive (Describe a favorite meal for, Write a funny story about)
• Adjective (a stubborn, a rubbery)
• Noun (moose, baseball player)
• Dependent clause (who opens a smoothie stand, who lives in a museum.)

Then, distribute strips of paper and have students write their own story starter elements and deposit them into one of four bags, hats, or bowls. Ask volunteers to pull one paper slip from each vessel and read the starter out loud. Discuss what elements of the prompts do and do not work and what might be modified to make the story starters even better.

REPRODUCIBLES
Use these reproducibles to enhance your students Story Starters experience.

Story Map (PDF)
To facilitate outlining a longer story, students can fill out this printable with plot details including statement of the story problem and resolution and summary of the beginning, middle, and end of the story.

Setting Comparison (PDF)
Students use this PDF to compare and contrast setting elements from their own lives and that of their story.

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LESSON PLAN	Lesson on Sensory Language Writing Encourage students to describe their favorite places using sensory language.
UNIT PLAN	Connotation: Effective Word Choice Promotes effective word choice, with a fun and exciting introduction of connotation through an examination of sports team names.
ONLINE ACTIVITY	Story Starters Ready to write? This Story Starter machine generates creative writing prompts. You never know how your story will start.