Exquisite Corpse

There's a great writing exercise called "Exquisite Corpse" that the children and I have been having fun with in class recently. It's a group storytelling game, in which each child adds a sentence to a story. The sentences are written on a sheet of paper... but the catch is that the paper is folded down so that you can only see the single sentence just before your own. All earlier parts of the story are hidden, and that one sentence is all each student has to go on in understanding what the story is about. The results, of course, are often hilarious and unexpected.

After our first round of Exquisite Corpse, we took some time to discuss what makes a complete and proper sentence—according to our class's version of the game, each contribution must be a complete sentence. I copied one of the twelve stories we'd created onto the board and we all examined it, piece by piece, to see whether it was truly composed of complete sentences. The check marks on the left side of the blackboard indicate proper sentences. The checks on the right side of the board indicate whether or not each sentence follows logically from the one before—even if it bears no relation to previous sentences that the author couldn't see.

Once there was a man named Fran, who wanted to fly to Japan.

He did not have enough money and he needed a new job.

So he went to a school where people studied bones.

The school was a giant skeleton.

It was the skeleton of Elmo the stupid dragon.

The town took them.

Or, more accurately, the town stole them.

Then they sold them and spent all the money on apple pie.

They hated apple pie more than anything.

So they flew to space and ate cheese.

The End.

As you can see, we have some fun with these!

(For the curious, the name "Exquisite Corpse" apparently derives from an early round of the game, played by members of the Surrealist movement.)