Story Creator

​In this activity, your students will work on creating mini narratives based on the words that are randomly generated.

 
Objective(s) of activity:
Learn about narrative structure by coming up with simple stories.

However, the narrative that you come up with must include a jumble of words that you randomly pick out from the dictionary.
 

Directions:
Do an online search for a random word generator.

I found a decent one here which allows you to specify number of syllables, starting/ ending letters and so on. For this activity, you can just pick any 8 words without any of these criteria.

Pick out about 8 words from the dictionary or the random word generator.

If you are using a physical dictionary, you can flip to a random page and get an age-appropriate word from that page.

Using a random word generator online, I picked out the following 8 words. 

​As with the dictionary, you can select words that you think can be woven into a story more easily with a random word generator. But you do not want to make it too easy.

This is also a great opportunity for vocabulary building as you explain words that come up that your students are not familiar with.

The next step is to come up with a general narrative that must include all 8 words. You can allow different inflections for the chosen words.
  
Using the words above, this is the short narrative I came up with:

You can do this activity as a competition where groups of students race to come up with a narrative first.

The first group to come up with a narrative can be given 5 points whereas the other groups can be given 3 points.

You can then generate a new set of 8 words for the students to create a new narrative.

You can also award more points for more interesting or creative stories.

 
Notes for scaling up/ down difficulty:
The difficulty level for this activity can be increased or decreased by just increasing/ decreasing the number of words that have to be incorporated into the story.

Another way to make the activity more interesting is to fix the genres.

​For example, in one round, you can require that the story be an adventure story. In another round, you can require a romantic angle.
 


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I would love to hear some of the stories you guys came up with. Share in the comments below!