- Family
- Nat Geo Family Camp
Week four: Create a ghost story
If kids can’t share stories with friends around a campfire this year, help them do it at home. This activity can even be done on a group video chat or while social distancing outdoors.
Life skill: Teamwork
Step 1: Come up with story ideas.
—Grab four pieces of differently colored paper.
—Write down the following questions, each on a separate piece of paper.
• Who is / are the heroes? (you, a friend, kids at camp)
• Who is the villain? (ghosts, zombies, monsters, vampires, a spooky kid)
• What’s the location? (summer camp, a lonely road, an abandoned house, your basement)
• When does the story take place (at night, on a stormy night, a hundred years ago)
—Have kids list as many answers as they want to each question, then cut them all out.
—Put all the answers in a big bowl.
Step 2: Create story prompts.
—Grab two pieces of plain paper.
—On one piece, have kids write as many sentence starters that they can think of: but, later, then, suddenly, unfortunately, etc. Cut them out and put in a separate bowl.
—On the other piece of paper, write out spooky nouns, verbs, and adjectives: blood-curdling, cackle, cemetery, tingly, eyeball, lurk, ooze, prowl, shriek, etc. Cut these out as well, and place in another bowl.
Step 3: Tell the ghost stories.
—Have everyone (up to four people) choose one slip of colored paper, a different color for each person.
—Each person reads aloud their paper so everyone knows the basic plot of the story.
—Appoint someone to start the story using the hero, the location, and the time.
—The next person chooses a sentence starter and a spooky word from the other two bowls and creates a sentence, working off of the previous person’s statement.
—Repeat until the story is finished, then start over!
Up the spookiness factor with these ideas.
Spooky faces. Have the person speaking hold a flashlight underneath their chin to add a scary face to the fun. If you’re social distancing, add a scary mouth and teeth to your mask.
Sound effects. Use different voices and sounds. For example, make a creaking sound whenever someone opens a door, or stomp their feet when a character runs.
Spooky household items. Gather props from around the house and put them in a pile. For every round, one person chooses a prop instead of a sentence starter and spooky word. Then weave that item into the story: for example, a zombie’s shoe or a talking toy.
Add suspense. Play so that only one person knows who the villain is and won’t reveal it till the very end.
So wrong and scary. Make list of cute things, then make them scary. (For instance, instead of a list of traditional villains, make a list of super-adorable things that you’ll make spooky.)
