What’s it all about?
The Story Thief Challenges is a twelve part series designed to entertain and promote promote literacy, oral language, reading and writing for 8-12 year olds.
In schools it can be used as part of the Primary Language Curriculum.
It can be tied in with authors visits to schools and libraries and shared within organisational social media. It can also be used by parents or anyone else encouraging creativity in children.
The series also aims to promote contemporary Irish children’s fiction and the many talented writers in Ireland who are easily accessible to schools and libraries. Each episode helps children develop their story telling and writing skills with tailored writing advice from select Irish authors.
Each episode allows children, individually or in groups, to put the authors’ writing advice into practice. Once a Story Challenge is completed, the young person’s or group’s work can be displayed to other readers on our kids’ stuff section of the website.
Each episode of The Story Thief Challenges is made up of three parts:
1. An ongoing, fictional story suitable for 8-12 year olds.
It’s a magical and exciting story set in contemporary Ireland that’s purported to be written by an eleven year old boy called Liam and his seven year old sister Aoife. These siblings go up against a mysterious figure called the Story Thief who steals story ideas from writers. Over the course of the twelve episodes of the series, the children battle to save their father and his stories and memories and their own lives.
As a twelve episode series with an ongoing storyline, the episodes are ideally read in chronological order, but each episode recaps the story so far at the start.
The series is primarily designed to be read aloud by teachers or other adults working with children. Each episode is about 2000 words long i.e. read out loud by an adult it would take 15 minutes per episode. Children could also read along with the teacher or it be read independently or in pairs or small groups using tablets or print outs.
This series can be use to work on a number of reading comprehension skills, such as summarizing, predicting, and connecting this story to other stories. To assist in this, there are five simple recap questions given in the guidance for each individual episode (see links in drop down menu or at bottom of this section). These can be asked to children once they’ve listened to or read the episode. Obviously questions can added to or substituted for these.
In addition, within each episode there is…
2. Writing advice from a different Irish children fiction author each month.
All participating authors have had novels published in Ireland or internationally in 2017 or 2018. All novels mentioned within this series were written for children between the 8-12 year old range. Writers who have already agreed to participate in the series, include Nigel Quinlan, Sinead O’Hart, ER Murray, Caroline Busher, Kieran Crowley, Pádraig Kenny, Lara Williamson, Erika McGann and Dave Rudden.
Each author has a profile page on this site. This page lists the relevant books written by the authors’ and the author’s suggested reader age. Some novels referenced are more suited to 10-12 year old so parental and librarian guidance always recommended for choosing books for young readers.
The profile page provides links to author social media pages, books and contact information if you’d like to contact authors directly regarding events in schools, libraries, etc. An author visit can be extremely rewarding for children, particularly in encouraging reading and could be an exciting way of engaging children with this series.
Each author’s writing advice is designed to engage young minds on a different aspect of writing and story telling. There are recap questions for each writer’s advice given within the guidance for each individual episode. There are twelve monthly episodes and they’ll break down roughly into the following sections:
- Episodes 1-3 take a broader look at story telling (thinking of stories, learning from reading, writing about own experience).
- Episodes 4-9 look at the specifics of writing a story (starting a story, setting, character, conflict, etc..)
- Episodes 10 -12 promote libraries and reading and writing in general.
As well as the writing advice in each episode, there is also…
3. A story challenge in each of the twelve episodes.
This story challenge is either set by the participating author or purported to be set by the mysterious Story Thief itself. It is an activity designed to put the writing advice given by the author into practice in a fun and lively way.
Each story challenge is different. Within the detailed guidance for each episode, there’s added information on how to use the story challenges with groups of children or individually in a classroom or other setting.
We’d love to see what the kids get up to! So once the story challenge has been completed then the final step is for teachers, librarians or others working with children to get in touch with us and arrange for children’s work to be displayed on the kids’ work page.
Jump right in!
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