Interactive Story Starters!

Again a post so nice I had to cover it twice!  You can see my original post about these story starters here. 

This has got to be one of  my favorite things done in writing!  Never again do I have to hear "I don't know what to write about."  This has been a constant problem in our class but no longer!

This website by Scholastic is great because you can pick the age level and genre (Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-fi, or Scrambler)!  This was a hit in my class of reluctant writers!!  They loved that they each got their own prompt and we are only talking about and introducing the writing method so it served its purpose.

I love how creative the prompts are, it really makes for some fun stories.

The process:

1. We started by each picking a prompt. This could be done in a lab or we just did it in class because I have so few students (I'm lucky!)

Some examples of prompts: 

"Write a short short about - a sleepy - kitten - cooking dinner on the sun"

" write a letter to- a smart - princess - who got lost in a magical forest"

"draw a picture and write a caption for - a polka dotted - apple - who plays baseball" 

2.  We wrote our prompt in our journals.  We thought of at least 3 things that would happen in our story and shared with a partner.



3. After they got it approved by me, they started writing rough drafts,  after editing with me, they worked on final fancy copies with pictures to accompany the words!





I could not recommend this site enough- it goes up to 4th grade level for prompts. It also includes different types of writing but we were sticking with stories for this piece.    There is also a great teacher's guide that offers even more ways to use this tool!  I forgot to mention that if done in a computer lab you have the opportunity to write your story write on screen at the website with printing and saving options- a great computer lab/writing/creative activity other than games!!