A quick and dirty guide to telling a story

Story-telling was one of the hardest things for me to start to get good at. I spent my first two years shoving twenty-four words into a story, saying them once, and then wondering why they weren't sticking and weren't helping. People kept telling me 'slow,' but it wasn't really processing, and it's only been over the last couple years that I've gotten anywhere even closer to being good at doing it. The guide I'm putting here is mostly a collection of lessons I've learned in the journey so far.

1. Come in with a plot. This week, the plot is 'someone has something they don't want and so tries to give it to people.' It doesn't have a lot of details in it. Maybe your story has a lot more details in it (at the beginning, mine always did, too. I knew where I wanted them to go, or what the object was going to be, or so forth. no shame in that), maybe it has even fewer, but either way, I always go into a story with an outline of a plot so I can drive the story in that direction. If it doesn't end up there, fine, but at least I wasn't flopping around helplessly.

Learning Locutions

The more locutions the kids hear over and over and have access to, the more locutions and idioms and so forth they start to add to their regular vocabulary. To this end, I've put up an idiom wall. Each week, each level chooses an idiom which becomes the Idiom of the Week. The kids, when they use it correctly and in context, get a treat. This means I go through candy very quickly, but it also means that kids are falling all over themselves to use idioms correctly - which means they get committed to memory very quickly. This week, Latin II is practicing excidit mihi and Latin III has nisi fallor. If you use a denarius (or somesuch) rewards system, that would work nicely for this, as would a number of other systems.