The Story

The first step in the process was to brainstorm our ideas. There were no bad ideas...just ones we blended together or chose not to use. Students had to really work on their collaboration and resilience skills. Finding that your idea wasn't embraced by everybody else was a challenge for us all. Some ideas were instantly group favourites, just needing a little tweaking.

Characters

We worked in small groups coming up with ideas for characters. Using strong descriptive words we painted a virtual picture of possible characters to include in the story. The final characters were actually an amalgamation of these ideas.

"without good characters
a story is boring"

Setting

Creepy. Outer space. School playground. Dungeon. Castle. Cold. Pretty flower garden. Forest. Future.... just some of the setting ideas thrown around by the students. Using ideas from books we have read and places we would love to visit we came up with a great variety of settings and locations for the story. Who would have thought that a castle in space would be the outcome!

"where will the story take us?"

Problems

No good story exists with out a problem or a conflict for our characters to overcome. A pebble, a rock, a boulder...a problem that grows exponentially then is resolved in an interesting way. Students could draw on their own experiences (physical and emotional) to develop the ideas.

"what will the characters have to overcome"

Genre & Theme

Finding a genre for our story was actually quite easy. We very quickly identified two genres we all enjoyed - humour and science fiction. This gave us an excellent starting point. Our school focus of growth mindset was suggested by many students as the theme for the story. The characters were trying to achieve something that they couldn't do...yet! Which was also true for many of the authors and illustrators. We all quickly found that practice makes perfect!

"I just can't do it...yet!"

After the brainstorming process we needed to morph all our ideas into one single story. We decided we needed to start by choosing our main characters. The main character decision as Euko was voted on and then we incorporated everyone's characters by interweaving them into the story. The characters influenced our next choice: The Theme. We went with a classic journey but putting our own spin on it, adding the element of friendship.

Report abuse