Lesson Plan 11: Beginnings

Every good novel needs a solid beginning! Setting the stage can have your budding authors stumped, so use this instructional activity to get them thinking. After examining the plot rollercoaster image (included) they consider the four places their story could start: beginning, inciting incident, middle, and end. A fun aspect to this instructional activity is having groups secretly write beginnings to a familiar story from one of these four points. After reading them aloud, the class guesses which beginning they wrote. Writers complete a worksheet applying these ideas to their own novels.