The Story Spine, created by Ken Adams as a warm up activity for Improv Theater, builds a classic story. You'll find the structure of the story spine is use in many popular movies and media. To use the story spine, have groups or individuals fill in the details in the following structure:

The story spine structure builds in:

• A Base for the story (Once upon a time and Everyday),
• Change: the reason for the story (But one day)
• The narrative (Because of that)
• The climax (Until finally)
• A conclusion (Ever since then)
• A wrapup and summary (The moral)

In the classroom, the story spine works well with creative writing assignments. In this article on planning digital stories from Scholastic, teacher Brian Miller shares a student created story spine comic in ComicLife entitled "Lunchy the Lunchbox"

See if you can visualize the Story Spine structure as used in this commercial:

Story Strings are a good way to have students brainstorm topics and ideas for creative writing. Distribute colored index cards (scaps of colored paper work well too) and have students use each color for a different part of speech. For example:

• Write nouns on the green cards.
• Write verbs on the blue cards.
• Write adjectives and adverbs on the yellow cards.

Have each student fill out 4-6 cards each and then trade cards with other students. Use the cards remaining in your hand as a starter for a story idea.

Story Starters for writing prompts,such as the ones found on the site Writing Fix website for left and right brained writers, are a good way to spur writing ideas.

Period is another improv activity that can help students create writing prompts. Select a group of students to create a sentence together one word at a time. Each student adds one word to the sentence until they feel the sentence is complete. The sentence ends when one student says "period."

Invent-a-Character is played with a group of students. Start by giving students the name of a fictional person. Going around the group, each participant adds one bit of detail about the person. As details are added, others respond with "I can see that" if the detail builds on the previous contributions or "I can't see that" if a detail contradicts with something already contributed.

Pass-Toss Stories use a soft ball or small object that can be tossed from participant to participant. Assign someone to serve as story starter and as they begin to build, they can either choose to pass the story or be asked by other participants to toss the story to another student. The ball is used to designate the current storyteller and to pass or toss the story.