Choose the story ending (Writing and Reading Idea)

If you've been doing storytelling, you've probably already thought of this activity before. I came up with it because for the life of me, I couldn't finish the last story and it was losing steam, and I wanted to do a timed write, but in a new way.

What I wanted was a conscious extra pass over the structures from our story. So I did an embedded reading of their story so far.

Here are the structures we were working on in their story.

Here is an example from one of my Spanish 1 classes. This is their third story so far this year.

 

And then after doing the embedded readings as a class, I told them (in simple Spanish) to finish the ending of the story and solve the problem for the character.  I gave them 8 minutes.  Some didn't quite grasp the simplicity of the formula for using the structures on the board.  But what are you going to do!?

Then I read through them, and wrote comments to give them back.  And I chose 3-4 of my personal favorites (which were hard in some classes because there can be a lot of really good ones).  What I looked for was that it was either: funny, strange, clever, or used the structures really well and gave us a good dose of those structures.

And then I printed them out and we read them as a class and voted on the winner. Next class we can act out the "winner" for bragging rights as the official ending to our story.

Here's my full disclosure though, they are reading something in Spanish because they task is to vote on which one they like best. So we are still going over the structures, just in a different way and multiple times!

here are some of them from one class that they are going to finish voting on next class:

What other spins would you put onto this activity?