How Can I Make Writing Fun for Students?

This Video Answers the Age-Old Question: How Can I Make Writing Fun?

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Are you looking for ways to inspire your elementary students to write creative stories? In this brief video, Monica shares one of her favorite storytelling tools, Scholastic Story Starters, for the classroom.

Teachers know that students learn best when they are interested and engaged in the topic. To make writing fun, Scholastic Story Starters offers different themes that will catch students’ interest. Young story tellers can choose between an adventure, fantasy, sci-fi, or scrambled story line. Once they choose the theme, they can choose their grade level, K-6, which affects the complexity of the story. The individual parts of the story can be changed to fit the needs of the writer.

Examples of story starters include:

“Write one paragraph about taking a journey with a sincere explorer who drives a locomotive.”

“Write an eerie story about a mischievous minstrel who suddenly vanishes.”

“Describe the favorite food of a jumping space monkey who has lunch on a star.”

“Write a funny story about a nervous grasshopper who opens a smoothie stand.”

As you can see, the writing prompts are bound to make writing fun and challenge students’ creativity skills. Students can use this free resource individually, as it is available on mobile devices. Or you can set aside classroom writing time and pull it up onto your interactive whiteboard.

For more ideas on how to use Scholastic Story Starters in the classroom, Scholastic provides a teacher’s guide. This guide gives lesson plans for students of varying ages and different activities you can do with them during writing time. There are even classroom worksheets that you can pass out to your class to enhance this class time.

What do you do in your classroom to make writing fun? What other tools do you know of that will help students to write? Let us know in the comments below!

About Our “How to Make Writing Fun” Presenter
Monica Burns is an Education Consultant, EdTech Blogger, and Apple Distinguished Educator. Monica works with teachers to make technology integration exciting and accessible at all grade levels. She has conducted well over 40 unique training sessions for SimpleK12, click here to take a look at more videos from Monica.

About the Author
Carolina Fransen is the EdTech Apps and Tools Editor at SimpleK12.com. She writes regularly about the use of educational technology in K-12 classrooms, and she loves investigating teaching jobs in some of her favorite locales. If you have an app, tool, website, or service that you think we should know about, please send your information or tip to editor@simplek12.com.