Children who write stories effectively are children who read a lot, fluently.

The Story Making Project was born out of this simple observation. To talk, or write effectively, in any 'language', a child has to be very familiar with that language, using it often so that the patterns become internalised. The problem with writing for many children is not a lack of imagination; it is a lack of the building blocks with which to imagine.

The project team wondered how to help primary children internalise patterns of narrative language to improve their writing, and whether what we learned from this process could be applied to learning stories in other languages. Led by Mary Rose and myself, and based at the International Research and Learning Centre in South Gloucestershire, we worked with a team of teacher researchers in Wiltshire, South Gloucestershire and France.

Our approach was based upon a simple notion of learning language which is defined in three stages - imitation, innovation and invention.

1) Imitation
The children are taught to retell stories. Teachers ensure that the children learn the stories in whole sentences rather than a stream of sentences loosely linked by 'and then'. This part of the sequence is focused upon acquiring literate patterns of language.

2) Innovation
Once the children know a story well, and can retell it without help, they can then 'innovate'. This means taking the known tale and making changes to create something different. For instance, characters' names or place names could be changed, or the tale could be told from a different viewpoint, setting or time.

3) Invention
As the children internalise more stories, and use these to create their own increasingly sophisticated tales, they are in a strong position to invent their own narratives. To do this they call upon all the patterns that they have internalised - their own 'store' of narrative building blocks including settings, characters, events, dilemmas, resolutions - plus relevant vocabulary and sentence structures. A key strand to the project is regular making up of stories, calling upon ingredients from the store of known tales.

Children learn the stories using multi-sensory strategies - an essential part of helping children retell independently. Learning is:

• auditory - the children begin as 'listeners' then join in as 'co-tellers' until ultimately they become the 'tellers'. The teacher has to begin as 'teller' but withdraws to 'prompt' and finally the 'audience'
• visual - drawing a story picture map of the tale provides a 'visual' overview of the plot. Using puppets, objects and pictures also helps children internalise the tale
  
• cognitive - emphasising 'connectives' helps the children to move through the narrative
• kinaesthetic - simple actions accompany most sentences and act as a visual and active prompt to remind children of the next part of the story - role play and drama are also important.

The children learn the stories very rapidly and soon begin to play with them, adapting the tales by adding in more events, altering what happens and elaborating. Older pupils in Year 5 have been looking for the 'bare bones' of a story and then rewriting the fundamental plot in a totally new setting. For instance, they discovered that The Three Bears is a 'break and entry' story - a story about a person who goes into a place where they should not be, damages something… and then the owner returns! So, they have rewritten the tale as a suspense story.

From our baseline assessment we can see that many Reception children have rapidly moved from having no story to retell, to being able to retell a story fluently. Many children with special needs have succeeded using this multi-sensory, oral strategy to developing composition. Children's writing shows improvement in overall patterning and pace of a story, with most shifting from having nothing to write to having a whole tale to tell.

Above all, the project has motivated the children to see themselves as storymakers. Colleagues were then able to move on to teaching the children the same stories in French. They discovered that when learning another language, children could internalise, retell and innovate upon whole patterns rather than just learn vocabulary and odd sentences.

Young children can easily learn a story in two or three weeks and innovate upon it - let us say, learning maybe a dozen a year. What would happen if a school had a strong storymaking strand through every year? By the time the children left, they would have learned and developed some 84 stories. Would this not provide a massive, internal storehouse for their composition and writing, as well as a vast cultural bank of inner experience with which to imagine, create and articulate?

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