My first graders have been learning about story elements, and how to put all of the pieces together to create a story. We have completed exercises to begin stories, end stories, and how to come up with problems and solutions. We’ve spent a lot of time developing characters and character traits. We worked with plot, and developed settings with colorful adjectives. This all has led us to beginning to create our very own stories.
This week we created a story together using story dice.
You can purchase some story dice like this…
Or you can use this online option…
https://davebirss.com/storydice/
We rolled 5 different dice, and the pictures we got were:
- Race Car driver
- Getting lost
- A spooky house
- A pirate
- A treasure
- A helicopter
The students and I worked together to write a story called, “Racing Out of the Woods” about a racecar driver named Sammy. Sammy was stuck in traffic and late for a race so he took a shortcut through the woods which got him lost. He followed a helicopter to a haunted house that was owned by a pirate named Jeff. He entered the house to ask for directions and stumbled upon Jeff’s treasure which he stole and donated to charity before going off to win his race. The first graders had so much fun writing together, and the story turned out great.
I then typed up the story on paper like this, and printed a copy for each student. They spend the next several days illustrated their stories. This introduced a whole new story element we had not explored. They had to read the text on that page and create one picture to go along with it.
In the end we read through our books again together, and then they got to take them home to enjoy with their families.