Ending stories - help required please.

[Tinkers]

DD is in year 5. English skills quite good, (better than mine at least), and she likes writing stories. She can be quite creative in her writing. She is also coming round to the idea she should plan her stories and other threads there have helped with that.
However the one thing she struggles with is how to end her stories.
Reading through other posts, the dreaded "It was all a dream" is obviously out.

Any help gratefully received.

[fatbananas]

Hi Tinkers,

I'm not an expert on this: going through the whole story-writing thing with my DS! But, from what I can gather, endings could be looking at how the character has changed/ what she has learned since the beginning of the story. Or a moral, fable-like: leopard can't change his spots etc.

I'm going through some collections of short stories at the moment, so it might be worth looking at them and working out how they end their stories?

[copella]

Perhaps she needs help to think about the distinct areas of a story. My son planned but had no idea what this meant at first. If she sees the end as some sort of resolution to a conflict or situation which she described earlier in her story that might help. Once they work out that there needed to have been an issue/problem then this improves not only their use of words but helps them then plan for the ending. I kept asking my son what the issue was which he wanted resolved at the end and this seemed to focus him better than the idea of a beginning, middle and end as he wasn't sure what to put in the middle and end bits. Hope this helps.

[mystery]

Thomas Hardy seemed to manage quite well with the characters quite often ending up being hanged. Charles Dickens serialised things in order to postpone the ending.

[pist]

Thomas Hardy seemed to manage quite well with the characters quite often ending up being hanged. Charles Dickens serialised things in order to postpone the ending.

Now there's a variation to "and then I woke up" : ".... and then they were all hanged." THE END

[Tinkers]

Not sure about hanging!
Either she'll love it and use it, and I'll be worried about her mental welfare or she'll give me 'that look' . (Didn't realise that 9 year olds could develop 'that look' usually reserved by teenagers.)

Thanks so far for the replies.

Any more ideas that don't involve killing people?

[ourmaminhavana]

Mystery!
Tinkers I would start with predictive exercises on texts/television programmes so that together you are guessing what the ending might be. This raises the rationale as to why you have come up with those ideas which will hopefully encourage your daughter to then apply this to her own writing.
Another idea is to ask her to write the first line/para and the last line/para and then she needs to come up with a link between them! Or to give her the last line and then she needs to work her way there.
(PS Thomas Hardy serialised his novels too ).

[fatbananas]

Mystery!
Tinkers I would start with predictive exercises on texts/television programmes so that together you are guessing what the ending might be. This raises the rationale as to why you have come up with those ideas which will hopefully encourage your daughter to then apply this to her own writing.
Another idea is to ask her to write the first line/para and the last line/para and then she needs to come up with a link between them! Or to give her the last line and then she needs to work her way there.
(PS Thomas Hardy serialised his novels too ).

Ourmam, that's brilliant! I'm going to use those predictive/ firstline-lastline ideas.

[menagerie]

Yes that is a brilliant idea.

I was going to say, tell her to look back at the beginning of the story and see what the characters wanted or needed, then round the story off to show how they either have this now, don't want it any more because they;ve moved on or have something even better.

Ourmam's idea of predicting would really help with this.

[ourmaminhavana]

Glad to be of help!