Teaching with Frankenstories

Building a curriculum

Now you understand the mechanics of Frankenstories, you have a choice:

  • Play Frankenstories as a casual game and let students learn from each other (players will usually model the winners).
  • Use it intentionally to teach advanced writing skills.

To help you teach specific writing skills, we've created a library of preset prompts based on Writelike lessons. 

This is a relatively new area in Frankenstories and is still in development.

The prompts correspond with the Teaching Argument Writing with Frankenstories lesson on Writelike:

Great writers know how to write great sentences.

Writelike teaches sentence mechanics through lessons based on Systemic Functional Grammar, a descriptive grammar model widely used in Australian schools.

These lessons aren't about learning prescriptive, abstract grammatical rules.

Instead, they are about developing a sophisticated understanding of how language functions at the word group, clause, and sentence levels, and how these components can be used to create rich, precise, and purpose-specific models of the world.

Some of these lessons include:

The activities in these lessons have all been converted into Frankenstories prompts, and spark fun, language-puzzle-like games.

Writelike has a variety of lessons introducing different genres and styles, which have been adapted into Frankenstories prompts:

Examples of skill prompt games

Below are some examples of skill prompts in action.

Bloody Entitlement

A narrative basics character prompt asks players to describe a character's strongest belief.

Screenshot Bloody Entitlement Frankenstories
(Source)

Time to Eat Something Else, Tony

A narrative skills contrast prompt asks players to juxtapose two time periods.

Screenshot Time to Eat Something Else, Tony Frankenstories
(Source)

Bombe Not Just Alaska

A persuasive writing game arguing why exploding food is the next big thing in dining.

Bombe Not Just Alaska
(Source)

I guess killing you was a bad idea

A functional grammar prompt asks players to use a prepositional phrase, with a specific preposition, in each round.

Screenshot I guess killing you was a bad idea Frankenstories
(Source)

The Whole Kitten Caboodle

A genre-based prompt asking players to write a classified ad based on the image.

Screenshot Whole Kitten Caboodle Frankenstories
(Source)
  • The prompts can be used from Grade 5+.
  • There’s no upper age limit. You’ll find they can be accessible to middle-years students as well as challenging for adults.
  • The real challenge is not in the prompt, it’s in the response.
  • You can edit skill prompts however you like, including changing the image, text, and round instructions.
  • You can play skill prompts as casual games or save them as game templates to assign and reuse.
  • If you customise a skill prompt and save it as a template, that is your unique custom version. You haven't affected the original.
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