Creative story helpers

I am so excited about a project that I just finished, I had to share it with you right away! I got the idea for these story starters on Pinterest (where else?).  I have a really hard time getting my students to come up with creative stories when I want them too, on random days they are full of them (like my kiddo who SWORE that he was going to Disney World for Mother’s day – that definitely didn’t happen).  I think that there are just too many options, it gets a little overwhelming for them.

I wanted to help them narrow down all of the crazy possibilities in their heads so that they could put together a coherent short (in our case really really short, but it’s a start) story.  So I created a set of Story Starters. I made four different color ribbons, the blue ribbons are characters – everything from lions, to farmers, to astronauts, the green ribbons are settings – the backyard, the movie theater, the jungle, etc., the purple ribbons are conflicts, or the type of situation that their character might find themselves in, and the orange ribbons are just random objects – socks, crayons, etc. to give the story a little sillyness and really encourage their imaginations.

We tried these out during circle time today. I had them choose one ribbon from each color group and we worked together to come up with a story.