Planning to Write a Story

The countdown is on and my class is spending a lot of time on the elements of a story. Our year end goal is to create our very own picture book, so we have been learning about what stories need. As a class, we brainstormed things we see in all stories. Along with writing, words, an author, and colour, the class was also able to determine that stories need characters, a beginning, middle, and end, and some action.

Once the class understood the common elements found in a story we are ready to start planning. We used the Story Planning (see on the right) graphic organizer to help the class plan their characters, setting, and the problem/solution of their story. As a class, we brainstormed a story and used the graphic organizer. We then transferred this information from our planning ideas into sentences. We used our Beginning, Middle, and End graphic organizer.

I used the Beginning, Middle, and End organizer to explain how we lay out a story. The beginning introduces the characters, the setting, and the problem. While the middle, describes the steps the characters take to find the solution. The ending tells us how we reach the happy ending. With my 2/3s, I laid out the organizer so that their sentences were already written and would only need some editing.

As a class, we were able to write our draft.  Update: Using my trusty Apple pencil and Apple TV, we were able to write a draft based on the beginning, middle, and end organizer. I used blue to show the beginning, red for the middle, and green for the end (see the example on the left). This piece was planned, drafted, and written as a class. Students were then prepared to start their own planning. See the next post for how that went.