Learning Objective
This will help you:
- Listen and react to your partner;
- With quick thinking and high energy;
- Create imaginative stories.
Warm-up
This is a quick activity that will get you nicely warmed up! It’s called One, Two, Three.
You say “one”, then your partner says “two”, you then say “three”, your partner says “one” and it keeps going getting faster and faster. Once you have got the hang that you can introduce different actions when saying one, two and three.
Storytelling: One word at a time
Stage 1: Freestyling
Once you are warmed up you can do the next part of the session.
This can be played with two people, or more if available. It can also be done with people over the phone or over video call. It’s as simple as it sounds, each person says one word of the story. For example:
Person 1: Once
Person 2: upon
Person 1: a
Person 2: time
and so on.
There are a few things to remember which will make the game even more fun and creative:
- Don’t be too clever. Don’t try and think of the a crazy, funny thing to say as often this is not spontaneous and can lead to the story hitting a dead end.
- Be obvious. Try to say the most obvious thing, the first thing that comes into your head, almost.
- Make it make sense. The words need to join together coherently;
- Don’t plan ahead. This means, don’t try to plan the story in your head before you say the words. The reason being that you don’t know what your partner is going to say and if they say something unexpected that doesn’t fit with the story in your head, it’s going to start to not make sense.
Top tip: Be obvious!
You can start with any word and see where it takes you!
Stage 2: With titles
This is the second part of our storytelling theme, but in this part, we have given you some titles below. You need to incorporate the chosen them into you story somehow. You can think of your own titles too, of course!
Story Titles
- The Giant’s Teeth
- A Secret Door
- Borrowed Clothes
- Talking Pet
- Getting Lost
Have fun!!