Collaborative Writing at Wellspring Living

Here at Paint Love, we are firm believers in the power of storytelling. However, we are also aware of the fun of storytelling! Especially as used in a simple, creativity exercises.

 This is exactly what we brought to the girls at Wellspring Living last Saturday. Along with The Creative’s Project artist, Meredith Kooi, we brought the two essentials of collaborative storytelling; paper and pens. However, we also brought paints, oil pastels, and markers for extra fun!

 We started our activity by asking one of the Wellspring staff member’s to give us a simple sentence. She said, “Out of nowhere, Batman entered the room”! We went around in a circle each adding a sentence to the story. By the end, Robin, Wonder Woman and Michael Jackson had also appeared in the story! It was simple, but we got many laughs out of it.

We continued this by each person writing a sentence on a piece of paper then passing it to the person to the right who would then draw the sentence, then the next person would interpret the picture, write another sentence and pass it on, and on and on. We had stories featuring ice cream cones as large as giraffe’s necks, Pocahontas talking to trees, and singing turtles and beauty products!

 Lastly, we thought it would be fun to do this exercise on large poster boards, the girls at Wellspring vs the staff at Wellspring! We got two completely different stories, but we also got two really awesome works of life that everyone worked together on!  

The staff member's collaborative piece. Try to guess what story they were telling!

This exercise shows how simple it can be to be “creative” or produce “art”. We had so much fun just simply telling stories in different ways! It was the perfect fun and creative exercise for a sunny summer afternoon!