Teaching Resource: Story Spine Worksheets

Starting a new story can be exciting and daunting. Lots of ideas swirling around, but capturing them and molding them into a finished story is tough.

As both a writer and a homeschool mom with a student who cringes at the thought of writing—any writing—breaking the process up into smaller, guided chunks took us from stalling out in the first half of a writing project to finishing it. Graphical organizers and resources with guided practice have been among the most helpful over the years. But, with minds that process things differently, it was (and continues to be) a challenge to find the right resources.

That’s initially how I got started creating teaching resources—with the building blocks of writing graphical organizer in the picture below (the updated one is here).

(As you can see, we’re big fans of Lego.)

My son will be starting the free Pixar storytelling course on Khan Academy in a few weeks. Inspired by it, I created the story spine worksheets below to go along with the course (the method is covered in the structure segment).

The story spine worksheets are the first set in a series of five sets that I’ll be posting on the first Monday of each month from now until June. The goal is to share a guided process of fiction writing with small steps that build and teach.

I hope these resources will be helpful to students, teachers, and other writers. Leave a comment and let me know how they workout for you.

View additional teaching resources here.