Story Spinners

Feb 15, 2021

Our young students who may only be attempting a few letters on paper can begin their writing journey with you, with some guided collaborative oral story telling activities. You will invite your students to share their ideas for a class story orally, each contributing a new part or idea. You can gently guide the mini language lesson, modelling how to blend and extend ideas, how to edit and monitor the story progress and how to structure a story into its main parts.

Our new Story Spinners can give you some structured support. We first introduced you to this concept back on an older blog post.

How to use them

print
laminate
cute
spin with pencil and paper clip

Class Story Mini Lesson

Remind students: Let's make up a story as a class. We can tell it with words. When we are sharing ideas we need to listen to one another and take our turn to talk.
Tell your students they will use the spinner to help tell a story, the spinner will give them an idea for what the next part of the story could include.
As the teacher, spin the prepared spinner.
Begin the story for your students with the picture it lands on e.g. The brown horse was walking down to the pond.
Now choose a student to spin next.
The student spins and adds the next part of the story. You may need to revisit the story so far. The sun was very hot and so the horse was very thirsty.
Repeat this process with new students until all elements are included in the story.