Fourth graders are great story tellers. This is in part because, while they have reached a certain degree of sophistication, they still have one foot—or at least a toe!—planted in the realm of fantasy. Ira Glass describes 10 year-olds as sitting “on the cusp of belief and disbelief ” regarding myths and legends, and that pivotal state seems to give them the ability to create fiction in a way that many adults just can’t.

In the fall, this year’s fourth grade class returned to Walnut Village, a break time project from previous years involving building a town for green walnuts and creating lives for them, even going so far as to design and carry out walnut funerals. During forest time , their play often centers on forts, bases, jails, and alliances, and it spools out in strands of imagination and very earnest beliefs about what is happening.

Given these ideas, among others, at the start of our fiction writing unit this year, Melanie and I decided to invite the class to take part in a group storytelling adventure. With a few parameters, they would create characters which would then be placed in a scenario.  From there, they would need to make decisions in order to move the story forward, with some outcomes being decided by rolls of the dice. Gabriella commented, “This sounds like Dungeons & Dragons. I know because my brothers play it.”

The kids agreed to give it a try and set about making characters to inhabit a time 800 years ago in a world where magic was possible but there wasn’t much technology to speak of. One became a dragon named Geoffrey. Another was a fox named Lily, and yet another was a tortoise named Jake. Several chose to be wizards or elves or elf-wizards, including the delightfully named Elfonso.

We presented each player with a mushroom-shaped cork and asked them to decorate the pieces to represent their characters on the map. They set about adding features to the corks and outfitting them with satchels, headdresses, and finishing nails for swords.

At this point, I announced the scene: All fifteen characters were on a boat.  They did not know each other.  I asked the players to think about why their characters were there. Then, they developed back stories. King King, the Upside Down Pineapple King, for example, was making his way back to his Pineapple Kingdom. Greg the Demon, on the other hand, was looking for souls to steal.

When everyone was ready for the adventure to begin, we laid out a large sheet of Tyvek, and I drew a line to represent a piece of the coast of an unknown island. I told the players that there had been a huge storm during the night and that the boat they were sailing in was destroyed. They were waking up on a deserted beach, along with a couple of barrels of food. I drew a second line on the Tyvek to show the interior edge of the beach and explained that areas on the island that had been explored could be colored in and decorated, along with the ocean waters. (For several, this became a project within the project.) The question, then, was what they wanted their characters to do.

In Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop, as well as in Musical Theater to a degree, we had already done some work with story elements:  character, setting, conflict, and resolution.  We had also looked at what motivates a character and the rise and fall of action in a story. However, right away, a couple of things came up.

First off, while some characters, such as Charlotte the princess-warrior-detective, sought to assess the situation and commence adventuring, others attempted to flee the island immediately or tried to zap each other in order to have the island to themselves. To keep the whole group involved, I decided to make it very difficult (but not impossible) to, say, teleport out of the story or sail away, and no one succeeded in doing so.

When Shorty, a wizard, tried to blast everyone else, Melanie and I felt it was important to let that decision ring out. Though Shorty’s effort did not succeed, we asked the other players to consider how what he had tried to do would affect the choices their characters made moving forward. We suggested that, in a story, actions need to have weight, and some sort of logic should govern a fictional world. (The same was true for players who wanted to announce random  but major changes to their characters.)

One of the other issues to arise was that the group seemed inclined to split into factions from the outset. Cracks showed in the escape attempts, which involved individuals and small teams, not the whole cast. Then, although the group, including wand-wielding Shorty, made their way from the beach up to the forest pretty much together, they would not remain so for long.

When a giant boar charged onto the scene, some tried to flee or float up into the trees. Niomby, on the other hand, attempted to befriend the beast, while Tommy announced that he wanted to “turn it into bacon.” (Bacon won out, but the dying boar announced that, now, they would never know about the treasure on the island.)

Not long after, in an attempt to drive everyone from the woods, a tribe of angry squirrels started raining nuts down on them. The wizard Gerald cast a spell to shield the group and bounce the nuts back at the attackers, while Shorty and Tommy decided to join the squirrels in their bombardment. One cohort followed another out of the forest to safety, only to be accused of “always following” the first.

Apparently, the discussion has carried over outside the classroom. At some point, Skylar announced, “We’ve been working on this so much. We made a plan on group chat!” To help kids transition into and out of character (and build a bit of a firewall between the players and their creations in the process), Melanie introduced the idea of players turning around 360 degrees before moving from one world and the other.

It has been particularly interesting to hear the players interpret events as they unfold. Max declared that, if Tommy had not killed the boar, the boar would not have said anything about the treasure. When Gerald tried to teleport to where he sensed magic on the island and wound up flying around in circles, only to return to the cave he had been in, Xander said, “There’s magic all around the island. It’s a magical island!” Others argued that Gerald returned to the cave because that’s where the magic was.

After further peril, discovery, and ongoing adjustment, we are now near the conclusion of the story. (Amazingly, Melanie has been shaping her notes and observations into a written narrative of the adventure. Each of the players will receive a copy to accompany the work they have done during the course of the project.) At this point, it would seem that, when creating a story and, thereby, straddling the real world and the world of fantasy, a writer—or a storytelling team—is engaging in a process of nothing less than multi-level dynamic problem-solving. Pretty heady stuff for a group of fourth graders.

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