Teaching Ideas


Here are a few teaching ideas for using Rory's Story Cubes in the Classroom.
These Teaching Ideas are Free. All I ask is that you look around the main blog and like my facebook page

For more details about the cubes please go to their website here 

For non cube related teaching ideas for creative writing click here

If you have your own ideas please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

What are Rory's Story Cubes? They are 9 dice with pictures instead of numbers. 54 pictures. The idea is you roll the dice and tell a story. If you don't have the dice you just need some random pictures to do the activities. 

www.storycubes.com for more info. Tell them I sent you. 

One at a time
Give each group of students a cube. Ask them to roll it. Whatever the picture it lands on they should start their stories. After a few minutes ask them to pass the cube to the next group keeping the same picture. They should continue their story, continue until all the cubes have been passed to each group. Variation: the students can roll each new dice when they receive it.

Superpowers
Give each group of students a cube. Ask them to roll it. Whatever the picture it lands on is a super power. Ask students to create a character with that superpower. How does the superpower work? How does the superhero use the superpower? Who is the enemy of the super hero?

Connections
Give each group of students a cube and ask them to roll it and make a note of what it lands on. Then they pass the cube on to the next group. Ask them to roll the new dice. Tell them they need to make a connection between their first picture and what is on their second dice. When they have done that they should pass their dice on again and repeat it make a connection between their 2nd picture and the 3rd and so on.

Metaphors
Roll the dice and display the results to the class. Tell them they should write a story including all the pictures on the dice but they should use the pictures metaphorically.

Don’t say it.
Roll the dice and display the results to the class. Tell them they should write a story including all the pictures on the dice but they should not mention any of the items by names.

Guess the cube
Write a story yourself, and distribute or display it to the class. Display the cubes that inspired the story. Ask the students to find how the pictures have been used in the story. Or use one of the stories from my blog

Creating Characters 

I’ve recently been doing some teacher training with Jeremy Bowell and this idea for using the cubes is based on one of the ideas that he showed in his ‘Activities that Work, for me’ session.


In that session Jeremy demonstrated an activity called ‘Tell me about me’. The idea being that you take out 5 or 6  things from your bag, show them to the students and then the students have to deduce information about the teacher based on the items.

So here is my adaptation of that idea using the cubes with the aim of developing the character.
Put the students in pairs and ask them to throw the cubes. They should take a photo of their cubes on their phones.
Alternative use one set of cubes thrown for the whole class.
Tell the students that the pictures on the cubes represent what is in someone’s bag. They have to create a character’s backstory based on the items. They then share their ideas with other groups.

Hope you like this one and thanks to Jeremy for reminding me of the 'tell me about me' activity. 

2 comments:

  1. Some great ideas here. Simple and smart!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I love the story cubes. Thank you for the ideas!

    ReplyDelete