Story structure help (year 4)

[NuffSaidSam]

Quite a specific one, but would appreciate any advice...

DC age 8 has good ideas, good vocab etc. but cannot structure a story. He just can't grasp the idea that a story should have a beginning, middle and end or that it should make any sense! It's essentially a page of unrelated (but well written) sentences.

He's 8, one of the youngest in year 4. Is this normal and he'll just get it as he gets older? Or should he have a grasp of this by now? And what can I do to help him along?

(Can you tell that this week's home learning is 'write a story'?!).

Get him to make a plan first. Google story plans and story mountains. Begining, problem, resolution, ending.
Lots of talk about the story and each section. Only write one section at a time.

He should have done a fair bit of story planning by year 4. Google 'story mountains' to help with his planning, then he writes the story from the plan, with a paragraph for each section.

Cross post must be good advice if two of us are saying it.

Canadianpancake

He did a story mountain. I had no idea what that was, but it was on the instructions from school. The plan was good, but when he wrote it up, he did one sentence as per the plan (introduced the characters etc.) then the rest of that paragraph was seemingly unconnected sentences and then same for the middle and the end.

So for example, the middle was going be set at sea, so he gets to his second paragraph and writes for example 'the storm was raging and the boat was bobbing about', but then he writes 'the spaceship was flying slowly through the stars (no mention of a spaceship until this point) and the tigers were creeping silently through the jungle (we're at fucking sea, why the tigers?!).

Maybe I just need to get him to flesh out the plan in more detail and then make him stick to it!

Is he reading regularly?

Yes, what Lucy said. I might ditch the writing and read, read, read for a bit. Short stories in particular might be helpful (Michael Morpurgo does good ones, I'm sure there are a load more but I can't think of them right now)

He's a very competent, but reluctant reader.

He reads non-fiction fine, but little interest in reading fiction.

We read to him every night though.

Get him to summarise his story first as:
Main character wants to ........ but ............. is stopping him, so he ...................... to ..................... and in the end ...................

Take a look at some of his favourite books and apply the formula above to them too.

That identifies the core conflict at the heart of the story. If it's not strong enough then work on it at that point, before he starts writing.

Google 7 point plot structure and then map his story summary onto the 7 point plot structure. Then, and only then, write the story.

Also make sure he has a main character and someone against him, and figure out why the main character wants what he wants and what the enemy wants (this should conflict with what the character wants)

I've just seen he is a reluctant reader.You can apply the structure and summary tools mentioned above to films as well.

If he likes telly and whatnot, maybe get him to tell you what happened in something he likes and look at the structure in that way? Or get (or make) some story cubes and tell stories instead of writing them to get the structure flowing without thinking about it too much.

If you look at Twinkl (free at the moment) you can find a planning template. Also look for lists of verbs, nouns and adjectives (they look like a placemat). Those resources should help him. (Teacher advice)

Forgot to say, you can search for resources by year group and subject.

From what you've described, it sounds like hes heaping together a variety of the same kind of sentence. So in school he may have been given a task to practice writing descriptive sentences about characters or settings, which would basically just be a selection of unconnected sentences as you've described above. But now he's struggling with developing those sentences into a coherent story.

Maybe try a story board. Stay with a really familiar story he has read a lot, pick out the key events and put them in a story board. I agree with pp that reading and exploring stories is essential. They don't have to be long ones.

Thanks for this everyone, some great advice here.

He is a real non-fiction fan both reading and watching, so I think you're all right that he just doesn't know how stories work. Luckily now is the perfect time to work on it! Lots of stories and movies while we're at home.

Today he's supposed to be doing a second draft of his story, but we'll backtrack a bit and try the plan and storyboard ideas and see if he can re-draft it to make some sense!