The 2026 CBCA Book Week theme this year is music to my ears – no pun intended.
Music is a form of storytelling with sound, silence, rhythm, pitch, texture, tempo, melody and harmony. Each of these elements carry meaning, emotion and point of view. The same is true to the stories children write. Whether it’s through an essay, a short story, graphic novel, a picture book or a novel, every piece a child creates offers an opportunity to have a peak into their unique perspective in life, their dreams and fears. When you get a glimpse of that world, it restores your soul.
The Problem: Children are not Free to Create
The challenge is that accessing a child’s imagination is harder than it sounds. In a classroom, children are often too concerned with looking smart, being the best amongst their peers, and pleasing the teacher to get a good mark to impress their parents. That pressure to perform rather than express shuts creativity down before it begins. Trying to get their ideas flowing can feel, as any teacher knows, like squeezing water from a rock: impossible.
We can point to many contributing factors: the excessive screen time and quality of content, the over-tutoring , AI generated shortcuts, and the performance anxiety that follows children from home into the classroom
The Solution: Improvisation and Questions
There’s a magical combination of techniques I invented that makes them create like never before: improvisation and questions.
Improvisation, drawn from drama and theatre practice, encourages free association between unrelated elements setting the basis for creative thinking. It quiets the inner critic, improves mental agility and builds creative confidence:that essential feeling of I can do this!
The core improvisation principle of “yes, and…” accepting whatever comes and building on it can be adapted beautifully for the classroom. In Saci-Books workshops, this becomes a dice-throwing game played within the Pixar Story Spine framework (originally developed by Kenn Adams). Students must accept whatever the dice gives them as their character, setting, challenges and we build on that.
We’ve had the most amazing stories: medals that made their way from lost and forgotten on the ground to the Olympic podium again to a pineapple who dreamt to become a boy and went on a journey to find human parts to his body. The best part? The children are always so proud of what they created.
Why Questions Are Just as Powerful
But improvisation alone is not enough. We can say that improvisation opens the door and questions are what guides them through it all.
Questions are the most effective tool we have for helping students make connections between cause and consequences. If my character does A, what should happen next?
A teacher who spenda an entire lesson asking their students “How? Why? But then what?” will find that students have, almost without noticing, practicedcommunication skills, explored character development, grasped narrative structure, and absorbed the function of descriptive language. Spelling and grammar can be woven in naturally during the editing process.
If the curriculum allows, the same story can extend across subject areas such as art and visual media and digital literacy as students transform their narrative intoa picture book, a comic, ora graphic novel.
From Kindergarten to Year 12: Every Child Can Write a Book
With the right scaffolding, students from Kindergarten to Year 12 are capable of taking an unexpected idea all the way to a coherent, complete story they are genuinely proud of. Some will go even further and publish their work.
This is not a gift reserved for “creative kids”. It is a skill and like all skills, it can be taught.
Want to Bring This Into Your Classroom?
These techniques are not typically part of teacher training, but they are absolutely learnable even if you don’t consider yourself a naturally creative person.
If you’re curious about what this looks like in practice, you’re welcome to explore the Saci Books incursion programs, which bring these workshops directly to your students, or join one of our upcoming professional learning sessions designed specifically for educators.
Book Week is the perfect time to start. Symphony of Stories is an invitation to let your students be composers of their own narratives, in all their unexpected, wonderful, messy glory.
The page is open. What story will your class tell?
