Story Chains are the activities in which each student contributes a distinct segment or section to a narrative. This is an excellent approach to stimulating cooperative learning. The students' vocabulary is improved, and they are able to use their creativity to connect the phrases rationally. Furthermore, it brightens the children's spirits because the conclusion is usually unexpected, which is humorous.

How to prepare for the story chain activity?

The first step is to prepare a short story that is open to several transitions. There are picture-based activities and word-based activities. For word-based activity, the whole class together can collect some keywords and think of stories with those keywords. For picture-based, the students are made to pick up cards with pictures of different places, objects, or animals. For better performance, the students can be given these keywords and cards or clues one day before the activity, so they can do some homework on them, brainstorm, and bring something interesting in front of the class.

What are the different types of story chain activities?

• Continuous storytelling - It is a type of ongoing storytelling in which a tale is started and then left open-ended at a critical moment. The narrative is finished the next day, and a new one is started and left open-ended again at an interesting point.

• Story Circle - A story is started by one person and then stopped after a few phrases. The tale thread is picked up by the next person, who continues it before stopping. The next student adds to it, and the cycle goes on in the same manner until the story is completed. The tale might start with a pre-determined title or theme to guide the creativity.

• The story about the student's native place - For this kind of activity, the students are pre-informed by taking out information about their native place, the history of the place, and the significance of the place in the current times. It would become even more interesting if the students could show pictures of the place, referring to it as “Then” and “Now”, which can show how the place was in the past and how it has developed now.

• Autobiography of just anything - Yes, anything and everything can have their own story. For instance, an umbrella is produced in a factory. It then goes to the store, stays there for several days, and lands in a house. After that, the places it travels with the person who owns it, what happens in its life further, the imagination can be limitless. Meanwhile, the teachers can check the vocabulary, ways of public speaking, grammatical errors and note everything to correct the students later.

Students can also collect information about famous personalities and make a story chain by sequentially describing their life stories. This can be a written activity where the teacher starts a story on the black or whiteboard and asks every student to continue the story by writing their own version of it.