Home Learning Resource – Collaborative Story Chain for GCSE English Language

This is something which will keep a class busy - or even a circle of friends if you are a parent looking for a resource to use with your child and their friends.

It enables learners to work on a single task together with each building on the work done by the previous. There aren’t many resources around which enable a class to work in this way. The ones I have done it with have enjoyed it immensely.
It’s not a new concept but perhaps presented in a slightly more modern way – it’s certainly designed for the times in which we currently live.

Each “Story Chain” task consists of a picture and the task – “Write a story as suggested by this picture”.

You email the file to “Student A” who completes the first part of the story – they are called Storyteller 1. They return it to you to check and forward to Storyteller 2. The process is repeated until you get to Storyteller 6, who is the only one allowed to end the story!

Students do not know who the other storytellers are in their group – to avoid classroom bias! However, there is an element of competition. There are probably more than six learners in your class, so you will split your students into groups. The first group to finish, following the rules, is the winner. You may have to ask one or more students to do help out if your class number is not divisible by six.

You can then reveal the name of the storytellers to their groups. So as well as there being an element of competition, I also hope that there is fun involved too.
The process can be done in a number of ways. You could send each group of storytellers a different picture stimulus – there are ten. Alternatively, you could email them the same one, to see how many different stories can evolve from a single piece of stimulus. In that way, you have nine more story chains to create.

There is quite a lot of emailing involved on your part – and so I have created two tracking sheets as well so you can list who is in each group and how long each took to get to the point where storyteller 6 finishes and emails you the complete story.

There is also an exemplar in this bundle of files which can be used to give yourself an idea of what a finished piece might look like or indeed to send out to your students as an example (although this would mean you were down to 9 pictures).