How reading published stories and making story webs can work together to enhance classroom story writing

Abstract

Many students find story writing a challenge (Beard & Burrell, 2010; Calfee & Patrick, 1995; Dunn & Finley, 2010; Dymock & Nicholson, 2010; Richards, Sturm, & Cali, 2012; Saunders & Smith, 2014). Teachers need a simple strategy that will have a significant positive effect on the quality of student writing. This teaching idea is about going from "Too hard" to "I can do that". Our suggestion is to use the well-known story web strategy in a different way by applying it to a published story and then going from this to story writing.