Here’s the guidance and resource materials for teachers, librarians, parents and others who work with children for Episode Eight of The Story Thief Challenges.

Story Re-cap questions for children:

1. What was the important conversation that Aoife and Liam had with their mother? Did her mother believe Aoife?
2. Why was Aoife upset with Liam after the conversation?
3. How did the two children respond to their father being brought to the hospital? Did they respond differently?
4. Why did Aoife feel Liam had let her down?
5. Was it easy for Liam to do the Story Challenge without Aoife’s help?

Writing advice Re-cap questions:

1. What should you pay attention to in order to ensure your dialogue sounds natural?
2. Why should your dialogue sound real but not sound too real?
3. How can dialogue show people’s emotions?
4. Why do different people speak in different ways? What are examples of this?
5. Do you talk differently depending on who you’re talking to? What are some examples of this?

Story Challenge:

PS: Here’s a Story Challenge for you!

Choose a character (it can be you, it can be your favourite character from a book or film, it can somebody brand new that you’ve just created). Write a short dialogue between your character and their best friend. Now write a second piece of dialogue between your character and someone they’re in trouble with (could be a parent, a teacher, a coach, a babysitter). With a partner, act out the two scenes of dialogue. Really get into the roles, go over the top, have fun with it!

How to do this challenge?

As usual this is quite self-explanatory. It could also be done by an individual child rather in a pair. Here’s some alternative ways it can be done:

• Could the dialogues written by kids be developed into mini plays? Could the children wear costumes and perform them for classmates? And could this even be developed into a mini drama festival?
• Make up a random list of different characters by role (i.e. teacher, police man, young brother, granny) then distribute a role randomly to each young person. Have them write the second dialogue between their character and that figure but without naming the role in the dialogue or putting anything too obvious in the actions. Let the group try to guess who the conversation was with and discuss how this was reflected in the dialogue.
• Comics are perfectly suited to dialogue so if a group of children are visually inclined then have them write out their dialogues in comic form.
• Set up the classroom or room you’re using as a mock recording studio, but with some real recording tools (a phone is perfect). Record the dialogues between young people as if they’re on the radio or a podcast.
• Whatever you’re having yourself 🙂

Once the challenge is completed?

As ever we’d love to see what the kids came up with and show it to all our readers on the kids’ work pages.  Please get in touch to arrange this on our contact page.