Tap into your kids’ creativity by letting them write and illustrate their own stories.

Instructions

Introduce the activity by telling a recent personal story and how it made you feel. With the kids, make a list on the board of 15 or 20 emotions.

Split students into groups of 4 or 5, and assign each group a few emotions. The groups should discuss when they last felt these emotions and why. Have one person from each group report on their findings. 

Explain that students will be writing and illustrating their very own short stories. In the stories they should illustrate an emotion by explaining in detail who, what happened, where, when, why, and how. Try to get students to include how the character will deal with this emotion in a healthy way and a lesson for kids who may be feeling this way too. After the stories are written out, they can exchange them with a friend to proofread. 

Once proofread, the stories can be typed by the students in your computer lab and/or  illustrated and formatted as a book. 

The Standards Connection

This project directly connects to the California Academic Content Standards by providing students with practice in their English skills. Students work on their own grammar in writing their stories and also learn through checking a peer’s story for grammatical errors. Aside from the English skills, they will be focusing on Visual Art skills through illustrating their own story.