Teaching Story Writing in Primary
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Teaching Story Writing in Primary
Christopher Youles
BLOOMSBURY EDUCATION
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First published in Great Britain, 2024 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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Introduction 1
The canaries in the coal mine 1
Need to know vs. neat to know 2
How to use this book 2
1 Plot and story 5
The rules of storytelling and why they matter 5
The difference between plot and story 7
Plotting models 10
Mini-story shapes and how to use them 12
Point of view and tense 17
Characters and their goals 28
Conflict, tension and struggle 37
Setting 45
Pace 47
Dialogue 49
Plot and story: A worked example 53
2 Types of text and other stimuli 57
Choosing the ‘right’ rich text for story writing 57
Imitation: A worked example 62
Choosing the ‘right’ stimuli for story writing 63
3 Planning 69
Planning choices 69
Learning goals 71
War of the Worlds: A worked example 75
Curriculum content vs. what makes a good story 78
How to structure your long-term plan 82
4 Vocabulary in narrative writing 85
Changing our view of words 85
Good practice 85
Before writing 88
At the point of writing 97
A quick note on grammar and punctuation 106
5 How to teach writing 109
Potential problems 109
Getting the building blocks right 111
A back-to-basics approach 113
6 Models of story writing instruction 117
The four choices of story writing 117
Teaching the four choices of story writing 129
Shared writing 133
Audience and purpose 140
7 Independent writing and how to assess it 143
Moving to independence 143
Teaching how to plan for independent writing 144
Assessing independent writing 147
8 Teaching pupils to proofread and edit their writing 153
The first draft 153
Editing 153
Proofreading 161
Bibliography 163
Index 166
Introduction
The canaries in the coal mine
Teaching children to write is hard. Teaching children to write a story can feel like trying to run a marathon backwards in a blizzard with your legs tied together. In this book, I aim to give you practical methods to get the best writing possible from every pupil.
Humour me for a moment. Grab the exercise books that contain the last stories your class wrote. I’m sure you’d show me some of your pupils’ fantastic writing – I bet you have a few names in mind.
Stop. Put those books aside.
Let’s dig deeper through the pile. Keep going. Let’s get to the books you don’t want to show me. The pupils who, despite all your best efforts, still fail to write coherent sentences, whose writing is full of fragments and run-on sentences. How have they got on?
‘Yes, but these kids don’t read,’ I hear you cry. They don’t try in class. Or maybe English isn’t their first language.
We say these things not because we don’t care, but because we care too much. Every struggling pupil’s work is like a dagger through our hearts.
I like to think of these pupils as the canaries in the coal mine. If what we expect as an outcome is unachievable, our planning isn’t well-sequenced or our pedagogical approach is slightly off, they will be the first to struggle. I’m not talking about having low expectations here – far from it. I’m talking about reducing the cognitive load for all pupils to let them concentrate on writing. I’m suggesting that with the best will in the world as teachers, we sometimes make things unintentionally harder for ourselves and set these pupils up to fail.
I know this because I have been that class teacher. When I was in the early years of my career, I would read a fantastic story to my class. Share with them some settings and character descriptions. Collect vocabulary in a word bank and get the pupils to plan out their stories. Having led them to the cliff’s edge with endless possibilities and choices, I would despairingly watch as they fell and crashed onto the rocks below.
‘I don’t know what to write,’ they’d say.
‘But, what about all the things I’ve told you? All the stories we’ve read? All the ideas on that big piece of flipchart paper?’ I’d reply.
They’d shrug in frustration.
There were always a few pupils who would leap and soar. You know who they are. They were the names on the books you first went to grab when I asked to see your class’s writing. These are the pupils’ books that teachers bring to writing moderation meetings and, with a straight face, reveal a story that an adult could have written and innocently ask if we think the pupil is hitting the expected standard.
So what do we do about it? How do we allow all pupils to fly with their writing? First, we must understand exactly the nature of the task we are up against.
Why is teaching writing so hard?
Here’s a list of what’s involved in learning to write: the physical act of writing, holding a pen properly, knowing your phoneme–grapheme correspondences, legible handwriting, cursive handwriting, spelling, vocabulary, sentence structures (simple, compound, complex, statements, questions, exclamations, commands), grammar, punctuation, syntax, figurative language, paragraphs, composition, pacing, audience and purpose, story structures, how to plot, using dialogue to advance the plot or reveal character, setting, atmosphere, which tense and person to write the story, viewpoint, viewpoint switches, exposition, characters, protagonists, antagonists, character development, character arcs, cause and effect, show/not tell, theme, conflict, rising action, falling action, climax, stakes, resolutions, planning, proofreading, editing and redrafting.
Then, we put it all on a success criteria list and ask the pupils to write a suspense-filled narrative in the form of a diary entry set in Victorian London (over 150 years before they were born!).
Oh, and did I forget to mention that some pupils haven’t had breakfast, some haven’t slept well and others are still stewing on a playground argument?
So, what can we do to make the whole writing process easier?
Need to know vs. neat to know
Here’s an experiment you can try on your own or with colleagues at school. If you could only teach five elements from that long list above, which would you choose? Which would you lose? How would you make your decision? Which would you classify as vital? Which aspects of writing should all pupils leave primary school having mastered? Of course, creating a theme in our stories is fun, but would you choose it at the expense of spelling or holding a pen correctly? Dylan Wiliam calls this the ‘need to know versus neat to know’ conflict (2023).
What do all pupils need to know from our writing curriculum? And if they’ve mastered it, what would be neat to know?
Our lists would end up slightly different, but I’d be surprised if writing clear sentences was ousted by the need to create rising action or character development. All these elements of writing have their place and are important, but we must make tough decisions. Our most precious resource in school is time, and we must use every minute wisely.
This book sets out practical advice on planning, teaching and getting your pupils to produce the best writing possible. By showing our pupils a new planning process, we can remove many cognitive load barriers that otherwise might have tripped them up. Through lessons built on teaching new content slowly and effectively, we can ensure all our pupils know how to succeed, and by giving them strategies for proofreading and editing, we will create better writers for life.
How to use this book
I’ve always been interested in writing both professionally and as a hobby. I’ve been on creative writing courses and I’ve written three terrible novels that will never see the light of day. Over the years, I’ve
read countless books on creative writing and watched hundreds of lectures on the subject. Perhaps you’ve bought this book because you are also interested or, like many of my primary school colleagues, it’s because you’ve been given the role of leading English across your school or want to improve your practice in your own class. I’ve found that the more I’ve learned about the craft of writing stories, the more I realised that what I was teaching in my own classroom didn’t match the knowledge I gained from my studies. By this, I mean that I was teaching my pupils how to write a character or setting description, but I knew what they really needed to learn was the art of viewpoint or exposition. The problem was that viewpoint and exposition were not on the curriculum. On top of this curriculum delivery pressure, you may well be working in a school that already uses well-established schemes or has planning in place. I have addressed such teaching pressures in Chapter 3’s ‘Curriculum content vs. what makes a good story’ (p. 78). Throughout the chapters, I have tried to distil what works about story writing and show how this can be taught to pupils of all ages to improve their writing. My hope is that within this book, you will find ideas that complement whatever planning or systems you already have in place. It may even get you to rethink how to plan and teach your story writing units altogether.
A quick note on research. I aimed to make this book as practical as possible, with many classroom examples. I considered adding research to each, but I have personally always been left frustrated by writing courses that delivered a lot of research and nothing to use in my classroom. I can assure you the principles of story are well known and discussed in numerous sources, and the idea of teaching from a sentence-based level has a lot of research to back it up. If you want to explore writing in more depth, I have included numerous excellent sources for further reading on writing in the bibliography.
Story writing is such a huge topic that it’s difficult to fit everything you need into one book. As a result, additional resources, including a bonus chapter titled ‘Putting it all together: A worked example’, are available to download on a handy companion website: bloomsbury.pub/story-writing
I hope you enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Good luck and happy writing (and teaching of writing!).
1 Plot and story
The rules of storytelling and why they matter
‘Today in class, I will teach you how to build a car. Here is a photograph of a car. These are the wheels. This is the engine. Here are the headlamps. These are all the other parts you need to build the car. Now I want you to build the car.’
My class stare at me blankly. A few who want to please me pick up a gear stick and a wing mirror and begin to sticky tape them together. Some tell me they hate building cars. Two car enthusiasts eagerly start building but soon become stuck.
This is how I used to teach story writing.
Let’s look at an example of a story written by a child in Year 2. As you read, think about what feedback you’d give to improve it.
Three people went to explore a cave. Their names were George, Susan and Tom. In the cave they saw some bats. They were trapped in the cave. This is scary? He thought. Two of the people saw some snakes in the cave. “Look at that snake!” “I know!” One of the people was scared of snakes, but one liked them so they picked the snake up. Then the shark came. They both screamed, “Ahhhhh!” The shark stared at them and thought about eating them. Yum! Yum! It thought. Then an octopus came and a whale. THE END.
Your heart drops. Where to start? What should I do? All this action, and yet it’s boring? What’s my feedback? Why doesn’t this story work?
You cannot give feedback that will help edit this piece of writing. It’s not a case of replacing a word, adding a comma or rethinking a sentence. It’s a house built on shaky foundations. Your only choice is to tear it down and build it again. The reality is that, as teachers, this is something we’d probably never ask a Year 2 pupil to do. Not only would it feel unfair, but I’m certain they would write it the same way again.
The story example doesn’t work because of the following:
● unclear viewpoint and tense
● no character goals
● no obstacles
● no stakes or struggles
● no logical cause and effect
● no understanding of the point of character or setting or how dialogue is used to reveal exposition.
The problem is despite all the vocabulary, sentences and grammar work, this pupil doesn’t know how stories work. Why would they? We haven’t told them!
We can show our pupils hundreds of wonderful stories. We can fill them up with vocabulary, sentence structures, genre conventions and grammar rules, but they will always struggle unless they know why they are using all of the different elements. They can stick all the parts together (and some will do a good job!), but writers need to know how storytelling works. We can revel in an author’s use of language, atmospheric settings and character descriptions, but these are not what keep us reading. After all, there are authors who are bad at writing but masters of storytelling and, because of this, have sold millions of books.
Storytelling has rules. Hundreds of books have been written on the subject, and endless podcasts, blogs and reams of advice are available online. Yet we don’t teach it. I have seen time and time again pupils I work with hit roadblocks and struggle with their writing because they don’t know what exposition is or about character goals. Of course, coherent, well-punctuated sentences must take priority, but if we do not teach pupils a few of the main tricks of storytelling, they are doomed to fail.
If it is this simple, why don’t we teach them this already? Well, for one, it isn’t in our primary curriculum. Our curriculum says we should teach pupils to write stories but it doesn’t give us any direction on how to do that. It was never discussed in my teacher training, and I have never attended a CPD session that showed me how to teach story writing. Yet we are all meant to teach it. I am not suggesting in this chapter that you harangue the Department for Education to introduce the art of storytelling to our already-full curriculum, but if you are armed with the knowledge, then clear modelling and discussions in class of a few key concepts can work wonders.
Teachers worldwide diligently plan their writing lessons following the prescribed curriculum content. Pupils write learning objectives in their exercise books stating that they are practising improving their setting descriptions, describing characters effectively or using fronted adverbials to improve their sentences. Yet we so often forget to tell them why. Why do we have setting descriptions? What is the purpose of a character? How can you use fronted adverbials to create an intended effect?
I have encountered teacher feedback highlighting the lack of variation in a pupil’s openers as the reason for the ineffective quality of their writing. But you could write a bestseller without varying a single opener. You can write a load of rubbish with excellent sentence variation. Instead, we must tell our pupils how stories work. We need to pull back the magician’s curtain and explain how all the moving parts are working, how they are connected and why they are there. If we don’t, we risk making the task we put in front of our pupils impossible.
As you read this chapter, I am sure you’ll think of exceptions to every rule mentioned, but a word of caution. These are tricks of the trade performed by writers who’ve mastered their craft. The saying ‘you have to know the rules to break the rules’ definitely applies here. Following the rules gives our pupils the best chance of writing the best story possible.
In this chapter, I will explain the vital function each concept plays in storytelling. Having a basic grip on these ideas will improve your teaching. I will also explain how these are best explained to our pupils and give you some practical ideas to use in class. And I promise you one last thing: you may think these ideas are beyond your pupils, but they are not. They may not know the labels or how to apply the ideas to their writing (yet), but they will have watched television shows and films, and hopefully been read hundreds of stories in their young lives. This will have led to an accumulation of story knowledge that you just need to make explicit and tap into.
The difference between plot and story
Plot and story are not the same:
The plot is everything that happens.
The story is what it’s about.
Let’s take William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Pixar’s Finding Nemo as examples:
Macbeth plot: Three witches tell Macbeth he will be Scotland’s future king. Encouraged by his wife, Macbeth kills the current king and makes the prediction true
Macbeth story: This is a story about a man who is consumed by his ambition to the point of murder. We see how he changes from a nobleman to tyrant, and how the power corrupts and eventually kills him.
Finding Nemo plot: Nemo is caught by a diver and his father (Marlin) sets out to find him. On the way, Marlin encounters sharks, jellyfish and a variety of other hazards. Meanwhile, Nemo tries to escape from a dentist’s fish tank.
Finding Nemo story: The story covers the loss they suffered in their family, Marlin’s overprotectiveness and a journey across the ocean, during which the main character learns to trust his son.
The plot moves us from A to B to C to D. Story is the overarching idea, which includes setting, theme, character and emotions.
The power of story
We can date the telling of stories back to 30,000 B.C. and the Chauvet cave paintings discovered in France. On the cave walls, there are over 1,000 paintings of animals, which are believed to be the earliest known record of humanity’s desire to tell a good story.
Most of us have had story shapes drummed into us since we were knee-high to a grasshopper. Think of the fairytales that took us by the hand and led us into the dark woods. The books that led us up snowy mountains, flew us to faraway exotic lands and plunged us into worlds we’d never dreamed of. Even if these story arcs and conventions are never made explicit, you will find that pupils know them or at least can make sound predictions on the direction of travel in a story. They know that Aladdin will rub that golden lamp and that Hansel and Gretel shouldn’t go inside the witch’s cottage. When reading aloud to a class, you hear audible groans as the main character makes a poor decision, because the pupils know that this decision will spell trouble for their hero or heroine.
If story conventions are hard-wired into our very being, what about plot and the art of plotting? Why does this matter when we are teaching pupils how to write?
Plotting is recognised as the hardest thing to do in writing. It separates aspiring authors from those who get published and those whose manuscripts go straight to the bin. The truth is, you can be a terrible writer but fantastic at plotting, and have a long and glittering career.