Writing Piggyback Stories

Years ago, when I taught preschool music, I used a book called Piggyback Songs quite a bit.  To create a piggyback song, you write new lyrics to a familiar tune (“Twinkle, Twinkle”, etc.).  I adopted the name “piggyback” and adapted it for writing.  Piggyback Stories is what I call them and kids really do enjoy writing them.  ALuv (currently 6.5 years old) has been working on one this week that I wanted to share.

1. First, we read and re-read The Enormous Turnip & The Enormous Watermelon.  (This Russian folktale has taken piggyback forms of its own with The Enormous Potato, The Giant Carrot, The Giant Cabbage, etc.)

2. Then, I told him I wanted to see if he could write a piggyback story.  What would he call it?  “The Enormous ??”.  We brainstormed some ideas together-what he could grow and who would be in his story.  I wrote down a list for him from our brainstorming session.

3.  To help ease his need for perfection the first time (an inherited trait, I’m afraid to say), we discussed a “sloppy copy”.

I showed him one of my sloppy copies from the latest Phonics by The Book reader.  It blew his mind how messy it was. 🙂

4. He started writing…The Enormous Carrot.

He wrote and wrote and wrote…5 pages with a little extra left over!

He didn’t want to stop.  Made my heart proud! (It took him 2 writing sessions to do this, about 45 minutes to an hour total.)  I did step in occasionally to help him remember the “rhythm” or structure of the book and apply that to his own writing.

5. I edited his work.  I helped him with conventions (mainly punctuation and capitalization) and some spellings.

6. He typed his story on the computer (with some help from me).  This took 2 days total.

7. We printed it out and he illustrated his story.

8.  We made it into a book!  Now, he can add it to his bin of independent readers and re-read it any time he likes! 🙂

 

Some Additional Ideas for “Piggyback” Stories

Folktales make some of the best material for piggyback stories because

• the story structure is predictable in nature (repetitive language; such as The Little Red Hen-“Who will help me?”…”Not I!”…”And she did.”; good always wins; etc.)
• there’s usually more than one version of the story (see the list below)

When you ask a child to write a piggyback story, it helps…

• to read at least two versions of the story to him
• for the child to be very familiar with the story line or structure of the story, so read and re-read the story(ies) several times
• to point out and discuss the predictability of the story with the child.  This fosters comprehension (for example, see if he can predict what will happen next).
• to brainstorm ideas together; possibly create one yourself or together first to give the child support

Examples of some folk tales (and their “piggybacks”)

• The Little Red Hen (The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza, Manana Iguana,  It’s my Birthday)
• The Gingerbread Man (The Gingerbread Boy, Gingerbread Baby, The Gingerbread Cowboy, The Stinky Cheese Man)
• Goldilocks and the Three Bears (Believe Me, Goldilocks Rocks!)
• The Three Little Pigs (The Three Pigs, The Three Little Wolves and the Big, Bad Pig)

This post was linked to For the Kids Fridays.

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Thanks and God bless,

~Becky