Speaking Activities › Pass the Story
Collaborative storytelling — one sentence each, round the class
One opening line, and then it belongs to everybody. Each child adds a single sentence and hands the story on. You may not repeat what was just said and you may not start again, which means every child has to have actually listened to the sentence before theirs — and that is the whole reason it works.
What is collaborative storytelling?
Collaborative storytelling is a spoken activity in which a group builds one story together, a sentence at a time, with nobody knowing where it is going. In a classroom it does something a writing task cannot: it forces every child to attend to what has just been said, because their turn is useless unless it connects.
How do you run it, step by step?
Put the opening line on the board and read it aloud. Go round the circle, one sentence each. The two rules are: build on the last sentence, and do not start again. If a child is stuck, let them ask a question about what has just happened instead — it counts as a turn and it usually rescues the story.
What makes a good opening line?
Something that has already gone wrong. A scene — it was a sunny day at the beach — gives a child nothing to do. A situation — a small door appeared at the back of the classroom that had never been there before — hands them a problem, and the story starts moving on the first turn.
From the classroom
The instinct is to jump in and rescue a stalled story, and it is almost always the wrong call. Wait. The silence feels much longer to you than it does to the class, and the sentence a child produces after five seconds of thinking is nearly always better than the one you would have handed them. What genuinely helps is the question rule — a stuck child may ask a question about what has just happened instead of continuing, so but who left the door open? is a legal turn. It takes the fear out of it completely, and it often improves the story more than a statement would. The other thing worth doing is writing it down afterwards. The class will have produced something far stranger and better than anything they would have planned, and if you do not capture it in the next five minutes it is gone. That is what the second sheet is for.
Which year groups is it for?
It works from Year 1 to Year 8 (US grades 1–7). Younger children need a short circle of eight or ten and a very concrete opening. Older children can take a whole class and can be pushed on structure — you can stop halfway and ask whose sentence changed the direction of the story, which is a genuinely sophisticated question.
What usually goes wrong?
Three things. A child repeats the previous sentence in different words, which stalls it; a child resets the whole thing with and then they woke up; and one confident storyteller takes four turns while everyone else disappears. The first two are rules you state up front. The third is fixed by going strictly round the circle rather than taking hands.
Can I print it?
Yes — two sheets. The story starter cards are numbered cut-outs so groups can run their own circles at tables. The keeping it going sheet has the sentences that move a story on, plus room to write the best version down before the class forgets it.
| Use it for | How | How long |
|---|---|---|
| An oracy starter | One story round the circle, one sentence each | 10 minutes |
| Warming up story writing | Tell it out loud, then write your own ending | 35 minutes |
| Topic work | Generate openers from what you are teaching | 15 minutes |
| Group work at tables | Print the cards, sixes, one story each | 20 minutes |
Do I need an account?
No. The setup screen and the worked example are both open, so you can see exactly what you would be running, and model it to a class, before anyone asks you for anything. Starting the activity uses a free trial token, and a Sage Pro subscription lifts the limit.
Free to try, and no sign-up to look around.
More speaking activities
Try Hot Seat for questioning a character in role, Story Builder for building a story from pictures, or Speak Like… for speaking in character. All seventeen are in Speaking Activities.
Written by a practising primary school teacher, who built Sage Teachers to use in their own classroom. Every activity here is free to try with no sign-up.