Use a fun and interactive activity to teach about story elements and have students create their own coding story.
I teach about story elements all year long to my students. We identify the main character, setting, problem and solution whenever we read books together. This is a great way to reinforce comprehension and retell skills.
I have my students practice using these elements in their own writing using Finish the Story writing prompts and my Character and Setting Spinner freebie. Recently, I created a My Coding Stories resource that will continue to work on this skill and add in some coding as well.
Simple Writing Prompt
I started off by making a basic 1-page writing prompt that students can use. I wanted to make it accessible for students that are beginner writers. They can draw a picture and write 1 word or a simple sentence to match.
Once they have come up with their story elements, then they create a coding story to match it. They place a start and endpoint and put some obstacles throughout their grid. Once their grid is complete, they can use arrows to illustrate the path they must follow to get to their start and endpoint.
If your students are up for a bit more of a writing challenge, you can create the craftivity with them. This not only has a space for them to illustrate their story elements, but they can also write out their story.
Once they have finished writing, they create their coding grid in the same way as the writing prompt. After everything is finished, they cut out the grid and the writing pages and mount them on a piece of construction paper.
These would make a great display of your students’ writing and coding skills to put up on a bulletin board.
Story Elements Flipbook
The flipbook is the most writing-intense of the three activities and has students not only write out descritpions of each story element, they also write out their story.
Once they finish writing, they can cut out each page and staple it to create their own flipbook that they can use to show off their creative writing and coding abilities.
How to Use
There are a few different ways that you can choose to use the 3 different writing prompts:
- You can decide if you want to provide different students with different prompts to meet their needs.
- Let your students decide which of the activities they would like to complete.
- Use the different prompts at different times of the year. This way you could build on the difficulty as the year goes on.
If you would like to take a look at this resource, you can find it here:
Digital Story Elements Activity
I have also made a digital version of this activity as well. This is great for whole group writing practice. You can complete it with your students, and have them create the story collaboratively. It can also be assigned for each of your students to do digitally.
In order to give you a good idea of what the digital version looks like, I made a YouTube video that walks through the resource:
If you would like to take a look at thie digital version, you can find it here: