Wanna know a really fun way to teach storytelling to your students while at the same time getting them to speak the target language? Then story dice or cubes are your answer! Story dice are a set of around nine dice with pictures on each side. Students will throw all the dice simultaneously or one by one, and with the pictures that land on top they must create a story.
Students can use the dice for telling stories out loud to each other and practice speaking, or for writing practice. Because each dice has six different pictures and all the dice have different ones on them the options are endless! These dice will really help to teach narrative writing as it will give students lots of ideas for fun pieces of a story. Let me tell you how I use them in my lessons as a storytelling teaching strategy!
Teaching with stories
First of all: why do I use story dice or cubes? The answer is because I want my students to practice speaking in the target language, and writing in the target language. The story dice provide an easy way that is low pressure and, frankly, super fun for students to practice speaking the target language to their peers. The subject is close to home, or can be close to home, as students build their own stories. They can make them as easy or as hard as they want to fit their language level. I love getting my students to talk in the classroom!
Benefits when you teach storytelling
What makes storytelling effective for learning, you ask? There are a few reasons why I think storytelling is great for students to practice. First, students learn about structure. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and so when students tell a story they are forced to create some structure. Second, stories are descriptive, so students will have to think of the right words to tell their story, which they will retrieve from memory of what they have already learned. So in telling stories students use knowledge they already gathered about the target language.
Third, when telling stories, students have to use the right intonation and pronunciation of the words in order for their audience to get what they’re saying. When they tell a story in a small group they get immediate feedback on whether they are doing well or not. This is still low pressure, but when other students think a story is funny they will laugh or when it is scary they will look scared. And when they don’t understand they will also say so. These are the reasons why teaching through storytelling is so fun and useful at the same time!
Using story dice
So how do story dice work exactly? Here are the steps I use.
- A student rolls all the dice at the same time.
- The student looks at all the pictures they have before them.
- From those pictures, the student constructs a story in which all the pictures, or most of them, play a role.
- The other students in the small group can also see the pictures and help encourage the storyteller to use the remaining pictures in a fun way.
- When the storyteller is done, the next student will start with step 1 again.
Again, students can use the dice for telling a story out loud, or they can use them to write a story down.
Alternatively, at step 1, the students could also roll the dice one by one and add each element to the story as they are telling it. Totally up to you, or to the students, if you want to give them some autonomy and choice. You could even have them all tell a story using the same pictures each time and see what happens then!
Teach short stories in a fun way
So this is my fun way of teaching storytelling to my students that are learning the target language! It’s a short activity that can fit in anywhere in the lesson: at the beginning to warm up students, as a brain break between more challenging activities, or at the end as a reward or review. I hope you will try them out for yourself to help your teach storytelling!
As to where or how you can get your hands on story dice: you can grab them here on Amazon*, or you can find a Tiger store near you (they are called Flying Tiger over here) and grab yourself a cheaper version! After so many years of teaching, I now own two Rory’s Story Cubes sets and two sets from Tiger. Call me a collector, but I need them! 🙂
*this is an affiliate link, but I love this product!
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