In my last class (a mixed level 1/2 group of 7th and 8th graders), we only got through round 1. The class figured out that they could embellish on the run, and there were some very middle-school embellishments. Here’s the first one from that group: I have a brother. His name is Howard. He has long hair. He’s blond. He has blue eyes. He’s tall. He loves to play tennis, football, and soccer. He’s in tenth grade in the state of Alaska in the town of Anchorage in West High. He has a dog. Her name is Penelope. Penelope is very bloodthirsty and small.

Here’s the longest–it got kind of unwieldy because three eighth grade boys have lately had a run on eating heads, arms, and small children, and they were interrupting each other to add more:

I have a green brother. He’s the very biggest brother in the world. He’s also the very tallest brother in the world. He has a father. His father works as an electrician. My brother eats my father. He also eats me. He likes to play tennis. He plays tennis badly. He is in the tenth grade. In a year, he will go into eleventh grade. He lives in the town of Jibuti in the state of Illinois. He has a parrot. His parrot likes to say, “Eat it up!” The parrot’s name is Bob. The parrot eats Bob’s head.

Given only three minutes of prep time, and because I had ask several questions because it’s easy to mix up “has a” and “eats a” (this was a great chance to set that straight in a truly natural way), I now have a new rule:

You get only X number of minutes to tell the story.

This class took half an hour to play, from setting up groups to reading every story. I was intending for them to do a fast write following, but we ran out of time. I might also change the prep time to two minutes for this group, and maybe a requirement for a symbol of some sort on a white board for every phrase so that they can’t free associate so easily.

In the other classes, the first round involved negotiation over what to say. In this group, the kids were focused right away on expanding, and they didn’t discuss names/description/age. In other classes, the second expansion included some negation of the longest story so that they could get their own information back in.

To decide the groups, we used a line-up of shoes from lightest to darkest. Then we counted off by threes. That took about a minute and a half. Then each person had to tell their group something unusual about a family member before sitting down together.

Michele