This turned out to be a very long answer. Hope it’s what you meant when you asked for an example!

I have been doing this with levels 1/2 up through the mixed 2-4/IB/AP groups. As Laurie says, it means that you can actually use the same story with every single class. Unfortunately, it also means that it’s even harder to remember who told what. It’s best to do the writing with the group watching and helping.

I started today with a story (that my more advanced kids wrote for my beginners when I was out sick last week–I e-mailed my sub a list of verbs that I wanted included). Here’s the story (watch how important the first line isn’t):
There was a dog. His name was Bob. Bob liked to talk, but his sister only liked to shout. Bob didn’t like to listen when his sister shouted. Bob’s mother gave him a pair of headphones so that he could listen to music. Then the sister cried, so the mother went to the store and bought a pair of headphones.

This got expanded with various extra pieces to:
Bob lived in (Anchorage, Alaska or other places) with his family: a mom, a dad, a sister, and a brother (and other family members). (and all their names) (and later, what kind of people they were, in some cases) Bob liked to talk, but his sister only liked to shout. Bob didn’t like to listen when his sister shouted. He always asked his sister why she shouted. She said she didn’t know. (One group explained that she needed drugs to calm her down.) He said that when she shouted, it didn’t help him do his homework. (got F’s on tests, broke projects part-way through) Bob’s mother gave him a pair of headphones so that he could listen to music instead of to his sister. Then the sister cried, and wanted a set of headphones. Why did Bob get the headphones? –To help him not have to listen to his sister. The mom explained that she’d only had one pair. (then there was some addition about who was spoiled and who got everything in the family, and who was the prince–different groups) She kept crying, so the mother went/drove/danced to the store and bought another pair of headphones, and brought them back to the sister. (Then one group had the girl continue to act out because once you start giving in to little sisters this way, it’s all over. Another group made everything end just fine now. One group had the other brother start shouting, for other reasons…one group lost the mom because when she went to the store she fell in love with the salesman…)

So really, this is just like the usual fill-in the blank story from Anne, except that it keeps expanding and expanding. And the different classes want to find out what the others wrote, so we’ll see what happens. There comes a point when I have to cut it off.

When I wrote before, I had three words for every class: sighed, broke, and swimming/traveling by boat. I gave those words to the kids, and each group wrote and gave me a different story in their minute of English (you can hand out mini pieces of paper for this writing activity). One group’s story was: “There was a whale swimming. It swam under a boat and broke the boat when it sighed.” We started with that exact story and ended up with a much longer one about how the whale wanted to get (forgot where) and needed money and there was a flamingo in the boat who had lots of money and was going the same place, but all the money weighed him down, so he couldn’t fly. As it turned out, he was part of the flamingo mafia, and was really a bad guy, so when the boat broke and he drowned, the nice whale had enough money to get wherever it was he was going. There was more about what the whale wanted when he got there, but I’ve forgotten. That story expanded over the course of three days.

Giving kids the three main words works really well. They love hearing their own stories come to life, and it’s a natural progression to expand on them.

On Friday, my last class of the day wanted to tell a tacky Valentine’s Day story in ten minutes. They created a muffin that fell in love with a rose, but his frosting girlfriend got mad.

Today, because some kids had missed Friday, the group wanted to repeat that story before we got to the dog story (and I guess we never really got to the dog story in that group), and it expanded to be that the muffin liked to dance and play basketball. He was at the gym one day and caught sight of a beautiful tall rose who was playing basketball so well that his heart nearly stopped. He immediately fell in love, but then his girlfriend saw him falling in love, so she ran across the room and slapped him, at which point he broke in half (complete with two different sets of actors falling down, a rose standing on the table to be really tall, stage slapping), and the cream went up to the rose and they ran off to the cafe together.

I got to add two reflexive verbs to the mix, and when a little first-year kid used a past-tense reflexive verb correctly (”broke itself”–which he had down because of the whale and boat story) to re-tell the story, his older sister (visiting the class to show off) had the classic dropped jaw. She couldn’t believe what she heard (she’s a fifth-year kid, and just learned that particular verb over the last two weeks, with all the second-year kids). Only lately have I realized that you really need reflexive verbs in Russian. I used to just avoid them all.

We told it with actors twice, embellishing as we went, and then turned to the drawing I’d left on the board last Friday so that we could re-tell it in a chorus. That was when my poor year 5 girl clearly wondered what juice these kids have been drinking. For her, what her brother said was grammar, because she had me for three years before TPRS. It’s a past tense, perfective aspect, reflexive, masculine ending verb. For him, it’s what happens when a “he” breaks. It’s just a vocabulary word. Even though she’s now had TPRS for two years, her brain still analyzes. My fault."

Michele

(I have seen this reaction too  :o)  Laurie)