Story Workshop: A How-to Guide
Story workshop can be done in any language! I have done it in both French and English. As an immersion teacher, I change my expectations when doing it in French. These ideas can be used in either language, even if my example photos may include French.
What is story workshop?
Basically it’s a hands on activity that allows students to create stories visually using loose parts. This is not just a primary thing, intermediates can do this too (and they love it!), you just have to change the structure and expectations around it. Story workshop is for everyone.
What is a loose part?
Well, it’s anything small. Common loose parts include rocks, gems, sticks, buttons, pinecones, shells…but it can be absolutely anything. As you’ll see from the images included, it goes way beyond that.
Why is it a worthwhile literacy activity?
Literacy is something that we work on every single day but not every student has the same success with it. For some, they might find the physical act of writing difficult. For others, it may be difficult to come up with an idea to write about. There are so many things that get in the way of being a good writer. By starting the writing with a hands on activity first, it allows everyone to succeed. It’s much easier to start thinking of a story line when you have physical pieces in front of you. Students start manipulating them, making shapes, building structures, adding characters and soon they’ve created the base of a story.
GETTING STARTED
Gathering loose parts
My best advice is start small. Look in your cupboards at school and at home for small bits you aren’t using. I’m looking at you, junk drawer! Go outside and collect some rocks, twigs or pinecones. Next, ask your families to do the same and donate it to your class, they also have junk drawers and old crafting supplies.
Next, try the thrift stores. You can often find fun things in the home decor or jewellery section. Don’t be afraid to cut something apart. If you find silk flowers or plastic leaves, cut them off the stem. If you find a chunky necklace with cool beads, cut it up!
Now that you’ve gone the cheapest route, you’re probably still itching for some more items. The best places to look are dollar stores (look in the crafting, decor and seasonal aisles), Michaels (or other craft stores), and Amazon. Some cities have funky art supply stores, go check those out if you have one near you (Urban Source in Vancouver, BC is great and has very unique pieces). Dressew is another cool place in Vancouver.
Remember, it doesn’t have to be complete on day one. You don’t need much to get started.
Here’s a sample of our school’s loose parts. See what I mean by anything and everything? We now have over 70 bins of unique items. Some was donated but most was purchased.
*Please know that this is a project that our school has put funding into for the past two years. Our entire current collection including backgrounds, bins and 5+ items for each month is thousands of dollars worth. My project partner and I have spent uncountable hours over multiple years shopping, sorting, organizing and managing all this. These are just ideas of what you can use, it’s not realistic for a single teacher to have all this on their own.
Storing your loose parts
I love the little clear bins from Dollarama. The smaller size come in a pack of 3 or they have larger ones. They stack beautifully too!
In recent years these bins have been hard to find, but I recommend anything clear. That way you don’t have to label, you can clearly see what’s inside.
LEFT: My personal collection of seasonal loose parts stored in my cupboard. I have one bin for each month and store the pieces in baggies. You can do seasonal bins or just use them for one type of material per bin. I like to separate my seasonal pieces from my “all year” loose parts.
RIGHT: One of our school’s story carts. The loose parts are organized into their own bins, so all the sea animals are in one, all the wooden people are in another etc. We have a different system for seasonal pieces.
Photo cases:
I also love storing my loose parts in these photo box cases. I have two totes, one is for creatures and one is for random things. The issue with these is that they can only hold so much and the pieces can’t be too large so you’re somewhat limited. That being said, it keeps it all nice and neat.
Note: I dump these into my loose parts tray for the month. If I didn’t have the cart and was using these for story workshop in my own class, I would probably choose to dump them into containers that are less “fragile” and don’t have lids. You could use some type of tray or other containers.
Seasonal loose parts totes:
To store all the seasonal stuff for our school carts, we use large totes. We put materials in small plastic bags that then get put in the extra large Ziploc bag for that month.
You can see in the photo that we have FEB-JUNE because we have quite a bit! You can absolutely use this system for your own loose parts.
Backgrounds
You can use all kinds of materials for backgrounds. The most common is probably felt sheets (find them at Michales) but you can use cork mats or round cork pot holders, mirrors, artificial grass squares, construction paper or even laminated scrapbook paper. Offering different backgrounds also helps students jumpstart their story creation.
Note: the scrapbook paper is too large to fit in a personal laminator unless cut to size. Laminate them using a school laminator or get it done at somewhere like Staples.
How to run your workshop (Structure)
There are so many ways to structure your story workshop, there is no correct way to do it. You can run it any way you want! Story workshop will take way longer than you think, so give yourself plenty of time. You need to account for set up, building, extension activity (if needed) and clean up. 30 minutes is not enough. You’ll likely need 45-60 minutes in total.
If you plan on having students write about their work, you can split up the building step and the writing step. In my class we build one day, I take a photo and print it in B&W, then we write about it on another day. In this case, 30 minutes is usually enough for my grade 3s to get the building done and cleaned up. You may need to play around with timing to see what works best for your class.
STEP 1 - Expectations 101 & Modelling:
You need to ensure that you have modelled how you want this activity to go. Everything from how to get loose parts to what to do with them to how to clean up. Can they work with a partner? Can they take handfuls of loose parts or should they grab 1-2 animals instead. Your expectations will depend on your grade, your space, your teaching style and everything in between so decide what they will be and be CLEAR about expectations.
You don’t need to do this every time, of course, but I always do a quick reminder of expectations.
TIP: If loose parts are completely new to your students, I suggest letting them just have a play session. Go over all the expectations about caring for the loose parts, clean up etc, but instead of making them tell a story, just let them touch them. In the next session, model how you can make a story.
STEP 2 - Prompts:
You do not need to give a prompt! Most of the time I don’t (with my older students) but there are lots of ways you can encourage a certain type of story or theme.
Start by reading a story that will give students inspiration (Book ideas below. Many of these books are available in French as well.)
Read a story and use the loose parts to retell the story or change an element about it
Offer a theme they need to work around (ie: kindness, bravery, winter)
Watch a short video
Pixar has many available on YouTube and they are fabulous for inspiration. If you’re a language teacher, many are silent films so no language to worry about
If you’re studying a person, region, country or culture, you can watch a video on that
Brainstorm ideas about a topic on the board
STEP 3 - Set up your loose parts station:
1. Loose parts bins
In our school we are lucky enough to have our story carts and have plenty of items to choose from. I suggest choosing no more than 10 bins at a time. If you have more than 10, it can be overwhelming for students and it makes clean up more challenging. I choose 10 items that we will use that day and place them in an area that is accessible to students, like a table.
If you store your loose parts in photo boxes or baggies, I suggest dumping them into containers or trays that are easy to grab out of and will stand up to a lot of hands in and out.
When choosing which parts to put out, I highly recommend careful selection. Don’t put out the farm animals and the ocean animals, that just makes it hard to sort at the end. Don’t put out green gems and red gems, again…hard to sort. Instead, choose one type of animal, one type of wood, one type of gem…this will help clean up go so much more smoothly!
2. Backgrounds
Next to the bins I place the backgrounds.
3. Containers
The last thing on the table are containers for loose parts collection. Students choose their loose parts out of the bins and put them in their container. When they walk back to their building area, they don’t end up dumping them all over the floor! I already had these silver pots that I used to use for something else but I also use some yogurt containers. A class set of yogurt containers would be easy to come by if you asked your families…and it’s free!
4. Choosing who gets to come choose their loose parts
I like to use popsicle sticks to draw names of who gets to come to the table. You do not want everyone up there at once. You could also have table groups come or any other type of groupings you may have in your class.
STEP 4 - Time to build!
Once students have selected their pieces and background, they head back to their table with their container to start working on their story. I often let them sit wherever for story workshop. Many choose the floor over a table and that’s fine by me. I just make sure they are clear of the no-go zones (in front of doors, the loose parts table and the sink).
Building can take them anywhere from 10-20 minutes or more, it depends how much time you want to give them. I give 15 minutes once the last student has sat down. If you have younger kids, you’ll want to give them way more time to build. I like to put a big timer on the board so that they can see how much time they have left.
Below are some examples of stories that have been created by my grade 2 or 3 students.
TIP for taking photos: If you want to take pictures of your student’s work that will be printed (in colour or B&W) and glued into their notebook or stapled to their writing page, put a name tag or a popsicle stick with their name on it in the photo. That way you’ll actually remember whose is whose when they’re printed! This would also be helpful if you have a digital portfolio for your students. You can easily upload the photo to the correct student.
STEP 5 - Extension activity
They made a visual representation of their story, so what do they do now? Well, this will depend on your grade level and your expectations. For the early years, maybe you’d like them to draw a picture of the story they created. A bit little older and they draw a picture and write a sentence or draw and label their picture. Mid to upper primary students can write a few sentences to a short story about their visual story. Intermediates can write a more developed story.
Alternatively, they don’t need to write or draw at all. I will often ask my students to tell their story orally. For French Immersion students, this is excellent oral practice. They can tell me, or a peer and if you have access to technology, they can even film themselves talking about the story. The great thing about the oral story telling is that they will move the pieces around as they tell it, it comes alive!
Sometimes they write, sometimes they label their picture and sometimes they do story elements. Below are a few more examples.
Seasonal loose parts
These are my class’ seasonal parts. I store these in those plastic bins in baggies, then each month I dump them into my tray (IKEA). Some months have more than 5 things so I rotate from year to year which ones go out. Below are examples of some seasonal parts. You’ll find that seasonal things (at the dollar stores or craft stores) are actually out before the season so make sure that you go early in the season to find Halloween loose parts, don’t wait until the end of October.
*This particular tray hasn’t been in stock in a long time. Alternatively you can use veggie trays, cutlery trays or desk drawer organizer trays, wooden trays with sections…any tray works!
Our school cart has a similar system for seasonal parts. We store the loose parts in baggies in a large Ziploc bag for each month. All these month Ziploc bags are stored in large Rubbermaid totes and we store these in another room, not on the cart. At the beginning of each month, we rotate what’s in the seasonal tray on the cart.
This is the top of the school cart. You can see there are different backgrounds and the seasonal parts tray.
Different ways to do story workshop & use loose parts
School story workshop carts
We are very fortunate to have 2 identical story workshop carts in our school. We have a teacher sign up for each cart using a calendar in the prep area. There are 3 sign ups per day (AM, middle and PM). Our two carts are stored outside my class and another class. This way, we don’t need to be interrupted when the teacher comes to collect the cart during their block and takes it to their classroom. Once they’re finished, they clean up and put the bins they chose back on the cart and bring it back.
Loose parts tray - centre
If you have some type of daily 5 rotation, have a provocation table or an early finisher system, loose parts are a thing to incorporate. You can have them do a story or, in my early finisher bins, there are no rules and I do not expect stories. Sometimes they just arrange them in rows (the type A kids!), they make patterns or mandalas or really anything. If you’ve got little ones, it’s great for fine motor.
This tray can be themed like the beach, rainforest, fairy house, ocean or Halloween. It can also just be a bunch of random bits, like the one with the dinosaurs or the the one with the pink and orange gems. They will still create fantastic things with them.
Individual mystery story boxes
We had to pivot due to Covid-19 regulations. Our carts could not go from room to room so we needed something that was individual. Enter, the story boxes!
Instead of students coming up to the cart to choose their own pieces, we created boxes (160 to be exact!) that already had a mix of pieces in them. We had two totes of boxes for each day of the week. One teacher per day could sign them out, we’d then spray them with a disinfectant and those totes would sit for a week before being used again. It wasn’t perfect but we made it work.
If you’ve ever seen the cooking show Chopped, it was sort of like that. Instead of a mystery box of ingredients, students got a mystery box of supplies and had to create with it. While it was limiting, it forced their imaginations to stretch and we were impressed with how they adapted to this new system.
For a more detailed explanation on the set up, see the “Story Boxes” highlight on my Instagram page
