05 Nov Five Good Places to Find and Create Story Starters for Students

When it comes to creative writing assignments, the hardest step for many students is coming up with things to write about. Fortunately, there are many good tools and websites that teachers can use to generate writing prompts for students. Likewise, there are lots of good websites that offer creative writing prompts for students. Here are some of my favorite tools for creating story starters and favorite sites for finding story starters.

Create Story Starters in Google Sheets
Flippity offers a random name picker Google Sheets template. While it was designed to randomly select a student’s name from a list, you could list story prompts instead of names in the sheet and have it display a random story prompt every time the picker is shuffled. Here’s a video about how it works.

Flippity MadLibs is another Google Sheets template that can be used to create story prompts. As the name implies, it can be used to create MadLibs-style fill-in-the-blank stories. Watch the following video to see how it works.

When it comes to creative writing assignments, the hardest step for many students is coming up with things to write about. Fortunately, there are many good tools and websites that teachers can use to generate writing prompts for students. Likewise, there are lots of good websites that offer creative writing prompts for students. Here are some of my favorite tools for creating story starters and favorite sites for finding story starters.Create Story Starters in Google SheetsFlippity offers a random name picker Google Sheets template. While it was designed to randomly select a student’s name from a list, you could list story prompts instead of names in the sheet and have it display a random story prompt every time the picker is shuffled. Here’s a video about how it works. Flippity MadLibs is another Google Sheets template that can be used to create story prompts. As the name implies, it can be used to create MadLibs-style fill-in-the-blank stories. Watch the following video to see how it works.Writing SparksWriting Sparks offers timed writing prompts to share with your elementary school students. Students can respond to the prompts by writing on paper, in a word processing document like MS Word, or by writing on the Writing Sparks website. The Writing Sparks website provides students with templates to complete as they respond to each writing prompt.Scholastic Story StartersScholastic Story Starters is a great tool that students will enjoy using to create short, creative fiction stories. Scholastic Story Starters offers four story themes; fantasy, adventure, sci-fi, and scrambler. To create a story on Story Starters a students picks a theme, enter his or her name, chooses his or her grade, and spins the big wheels of prompts. The student can spin the wheels until he or she finds a prompt he or she likes. After the prompt is selected the student can write his or her story using the letter, postcard, notebook, or newspaper format provided by Scholastic Story Starters. When the story is finished it can be printed.Make Beliefs Comixthe Make Beliefs Comix journaling ebooks filled with ideas for students to write about. Many of those ebooks are excellent for social emotional learning activities as well as creative writing activities. All of the ebooks are available as fillable PDFs that your students can download and share with you when they’re done writing. Watch this short video to learn how to use the free ebooks from Make Beliefs Comix. (Disclosure: Make Beliefs Comix is an advertiser on this blog). WriteReaderWriteReader is a good tool for elementary school students to use to write multimedia stories. WriteReader has two distinguishing features that I always point out to new users. First, it provides space for teachers to give feedback to students directly under every word that they write. Second, WriteReader has a huge library of images, including some from popular programs like Sesame Street, that can be used for writing prompts. WriteReader does have a Google Classroom integration that makes it easy to get your students started creating picture-based stories. A series of WriteReader tutorials is available here. Creative Writing, Free Technology For Teachers, Language Arts, story starters, Writing PromptsRead More