I occasionally like to browse at my local Barnes and Noble bookstore. On one trip I came across the book Practice You by Elena Brower. In another section of the store I found the card deck for Practice You.

I wanted to create a deck of my own, but I had no idea how to create one, and for awhile, I did not have any content ideas as a reason to create cards.

However, after writing Story Secrets from Scripture, I started developing a workshop to teach the content from the book. During this development process I received an invitation to attend a webinar on how to create card decks. Like a majority of webinars, the goal of this one was to sell a course on the process to create content (in this case, card decks).

Story Secrets from Scripture

From the back cover: Story Secrets from Scripture, you will discover why structure in stories is important, how Jesus effectively used parable story teaching, and how you can too. After reading this book you will be able to:

• Use a simple five-part structure to plan any story
• Apply Bible-based approaches to introducing and concluding a story
• Find personal experiences to adapt for use as teaching stories
• Effectively use props, handouts, and slides
• Find opportunities to improve and share stories

Included in the book are numerous parables of Jesus and examples of personal stories. While an entire library of books exists on understanding story structure, writing screenplays, and how to improve public speaking by telling stories, Story Secrets from Scripture was specifically written to bring you the essential information you need to refresh your story telling techniques or get started for the first time on the exciting journey of telling short children’s stories.

Workshop Outline

My pre-COVID plan was to hold in-person workshops at churches, where everyone gets a copy of the book and participates in the workshop. I used a table to outline the content:

• Session
• Goal (participants will)
• Objective (participants will be able to)
• Activities
• Methods
• Homework

Card Deck

This same outline worked well to design my card deck. Below is the information about the card deck from the packaging.

This set of 36 workshop cards covers …

Finding stories

• Story structure
• Storytelling techniques
• Improving stories

A list of the card topics is included in the packaging …

In this series of posts I’ll share how I created the card deck, including the design in Keynote and the setup in a game-making website.