examples of creative writing ks2

7 Techniques for Generating Story Writing Ideas in KS2

Key stage 2 is a great time for children..

Typically, they will have settled into the flow of learning new subjects, and as KS2 teachers you get to help them flourish by practising, repeating and refining their learnt skills. When it comes to teaching literacy this also means encouraging your class’s creativity. 

However, on occasion creativity can be hard to come by and story writing lessons might not produce the outcomes you were hoping for. To help you combat this, here are some techniques and ideas to help you inspire your class with creative writing tasks.  

1. Create a Classroom Story Generator 

Write the ideas on paper and cut them out, then fold them up so you can’t see what’s written on them.

Find three bags (or any kind of container). Place all the folded character ideas in the first bag, the scenes in the second and the situations/tasks in the third. Ask each pupil to come up and draw a folded piece of paper from each bag. This will be the start of their story. Alternatively, you could build up five story-starting sentences from the bags and write them on the board. Your class could then choose which story they want to write.

Here are some examples to get you started:

You can tailor the ideas to suit your pupils’ abilities, age and preferences, which should really help to spark their imaginations.

2.  Watch or Listen

It doesn’t have to be long or have any dialogue, but showing a short film to your class may help to trigger inspiration. Luckily there are literally millions of free videos available for this kind of thing. Vet them first to make sure they are completely suitable for your class, then turn down the lights and press play. You can show the video more than once, maybe asking the children to write notes on the second viewing which will help to inspire their stories. 

Alternatively try playing a piece of instrumental music and ask your class to imagine what might be happening. Write their ideas and thoughts on the board and ask them to use this as the inspiration for a story.

3.  Folklore and Fairy Tales 

4.  Storyboards

You’re not asking your class to be artists; they can use simple stick figures and words to get their ideas down on paper. But asking your class to draw out their ideas will help them generate some interesting story twists. By getting the structure of their stories down on paper in a sequence, they will know the beginning, middle and end of their stories so when they come to start writing it out there’s not an ounce of KS2 writers block in sight!

5.  A Newspaper Clipping

Newspapers can be a huge source of inspiration. Interesting or unusual stories can be cut out and stuck into a scrap book to bring out and show your class in times of creative need! Alternatively, you could show your whole class a newspaper clipping and ask them all to write a story about the same extract.

6.  Rewrite A Known Story 

Rewriting a known story with a different ending or a different character is a great way to generate inspiration. This technique for generating story ideas can’t fail to produce results since the possibilities are endless!

For example:

• What if Little Red Riding Hood lived in a jungle instead of a forest?
• What if the three little pigs were the three little wolves instead, and the big bad pig wanted to eat them for his dinner?
• What if Hansel and Gretel were actually the bad ones and wanted to eat the old lady?
• What if you asked your class to swap the characters in one story with the characters in another – Snow White and the Magic Beans, Jack and the Seven Dwarves. Let your class’s imaginations run free and look forward to reading the end results!

7.  Let the Children Choose

Set some homework for the children to go away and think of something they care about, something they are interested in, something which makes them happy, sad or angry and why that is. You could ask them to find a picture or a news story themselves which sparks their interest or emotion.

From the ideas generated at home, ask them to write a story in class. Passion is a wonderful muse after all, so if the children choose a topic that they really care about you should end up with some very good results!

Excited to teach imaginative writing in a new way? Mighty Writer can help!

Founder Emma Ralph discusses how mighty writer allows children to plan and write their own stories using just pictures. 30sec

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KS2 Creative Writing for Yr 4/5/6

Subject: English

Age range: 7-11

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

22 June 2020

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Powerpoint and worksheets for KS2 creative writing lessons. The tasks are designed to help students improve their creative writing. There is a task on developing characters, writing dialogue, describing emotions and describing setting.

There is a Powerpoint that links to the tasks and the final aim is to get students writing their own story about a hero going on a quest.

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• Creative Writing Ks2 Using The Dramatic Imagination

Creative writing KS2 – using the dramatic imagination

Harness the artists' 'secret code' to help pupils develop a gripping narrative…

How can we support students to write creatively? It is a great teaching conundrum.

We have all been there: spending hours setting up a stimulating scenario – a story-starter, an intriguing image, a dramatic moment – in the hope of grabbing the children’s imagination and inspiring them to write a gripping narrative.

Only to sit down later and read something truly depressing like, I walked to the door, I was scared. Then I opened the door and a monster attacked me. I died. Aagh!

It is easy to get frustrated (I know I have) but there is a solution: it is called the dramatic imagination.

The dramatic imagination is the secret code of artists. It is used in literature, film, theatre, art, and music. It is the vocabulary of mood and atmosphere, the language of setting and environment, the magic key to ‘show, not tell’. And we can teach it to children.

What is the dramatic imagination?

There are six dimensions to the dramatic imagination: sound/silence; movement/stillness; darkness/light. You might like to try them yourself.

Imagine standing in a room in an old house. It is night-time, on one side of the room is a paned window, on the other, a single door. Now describe where the light comes from and where it falls in the room. Is it from the moon outside, casting a silver light on the floor? Or a flicking candle on a table near the door?

Describe what sounds you can hear: the wind outside; the creak of the floorboards; the sound of your heart beating? Now take a step towards the door, describe your movement.

Describe the stillness in the room; the darkness; the silence. Now reach out to take hold of the door handle, describe the response from your body, the blood rushing through your veins, the slow movement of your arm, the stiffness of your hand…

How much did you write? If you are like me (and the students who learn how to do this) it will have been a lot. The story hasn’t progressed far, but there is a sense of atmosphere, of building suspense , of fear.

You can imagine it as a film: the music slowly building, the screech of violins, the close-up of the actor’s hand. This is the power of imagination.

We can start using the dramatic imagination as soon as children come to school. In fact, it is one of the great features of the six dimensions that we already use them as a natural part of our teaching whenever we read a book to a class or share a picture.

They are all around us, all the time, the trick is to point them out, and later to teach them explicitly.

How to use it in the classroom

I first did this successfully with a Year 2 class using Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man. I started by writing the six dimensions on a large sheet of paper and asking the students to point them out as we read through the story (projecting the text onto the whiteboard):

The wind sang [sound] through his iron fingers [movement]. His great iron head, shaped like a dustbin but as big as a bedroom, slowly turned to the right [movement] , slowly turned to the left [movement]. His iron ears turned, this way, that way [movement]. He was hearing the sea [sound]. His eyes, like headlamps [light], glowed white, then red, then infrared [light] , searching the sea. Never before had the Iron Man seen the sea.

I then supported the students to use the dimensions in their own writing, first while doing guided writing, and then in independent writing. Giving them feedback such as: “You’ve got a sense of movement and sound here, but where is the stillness and silence?”, it was surprising how quickly the children picked them up and how effectively using them improved their writing.

Later, when I taught Year 6 the effect was quicker still and even more effective.

The dimensions are, in my experience, something children understand intuitively and begin to apply almost as soon as they become competent writers.

They often find joy in using a ‘secret code’ used by expert writers, artists, and filmmakers, and the six dimensions can transform children’s writing, giving them a strategy to move beyond ‘then/and’ stories, as well as providing a vocabulary for teachers to provide practical feedback which the children can use to develop their story-telling skills.

It is exciting to use too, and you’ll have fun incorporating it into your own teaching – teaching as storytelling:

The old house stood alone at the top of the hill, no one had been inside for years. Nothing moved except for the dark figures of animals scurrying across its rotten floorboards, nothing lived in the rooms but shadows filling every corner and every space. The wind and the sun and the rain had not been kind to the house’s paintwork which had once been bright and beautiful, but now lay still on the ground like a pale snow. “Why,” I asked myself, “had I promised to spend a night here, alone?”

Tim Taylor is a freelance teacher, and author of A Beginner’s Guide to Mantle of the Expert . Follow Tim on Twitter @imagineinquiry . Read more about building suspense in writing in KS2 .

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Setting descriptions – KS2 creative writing

Use these strategies to give children the tools they need to create powerful settings for their descriptive writing.

By Sue Drury

Last updated 22 September 2020

The writer sat in the eerie darkness. Looming shadows, cast by a single desk lamp and the cold glow of the laptop, surrounded her, mocking her struggles with finding a way in to her next piece. The stale stench of her long-finished microwave ready-meal hung in the air and the only sound was the tap-tapping of her fingers on the keyboard… that and the disparaging ticking of the clock on the wall, reminding her that it was late and she still had so much to do…

Story setting can go a long way towards establishing the atmosphere of a narrative and giving it a sense of tangible reality for the reader, yet they are features that are often under-emphasised when it comes to teaching story writing.

Here are some tips for helping your pupils create the perfect environment in which their character and plot can flourish.

Include scene description in your plan

As with all good writing, an engaging story starts with a good plan. As well as outlining the characters, overall plot, important events and so on, it is essential that this contains detailed information about the setting or settings (because there are usually more than one).

Encourage your pupils to form a clear picture in their heads of these locations and note down every specific detail with key words and rich descriptions. Try getting them to close their eyes and sit in silence while they create vivid pictures with their minds that they can then convert into words.

What’s more, urge them to focus on the little things as well as the big backdrops; after all, details often make a memorable difference.

To help them make sure that they cover all the important aspects of their setting, use our ‘Getting a Setting’ resource – part of our Effective Writing collection.

Making sense of it all

One of the first things to encourage your pupils to do is to engage all their senses when writing the setting. The temptation is often just to describe what can be seen, yet sounds and smells can often connect more powerfully with people than what merely meets their eyes.

Even the sense of touch, like the chilling caress of a sudden breeze, can add to the atmosphere.

Setting descriptions – show not tell

There are few hard-and-fast rules governing how to write a setting description but “show not tell” has to be one of them.

Although this is more straightforward when describing characters and actions, it can be applied to settings in the way that the protagonists interact with their surroundings. Even so, this does not totally negate the need for precise and evocative vocabulary.

Descriptive words – quality over quantity

Much though we like to encourage pupils to use their very best words, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Forgive the sacrilege but, if we are honest, even some highly respected authors and well-loved novels can occasionally make you want to scream, “Get on with it!” as you plough bravely on through line after line of detailed description.

Encourage your pupils to focus on the things that really contribute to the establishment of a convincing setting and actually matter to the progress of the plot.

Being able to share good setting description examples is always invaluable in these situations. Of course, you could spend hours scanning through a stack of novels to find the perfect extract.

Alternatively, why not save yourself the bother by using our KS2 challenge mat for story settings ? As well as providing model texts for pupils to study and discuss, it includes inspiring images to stimulate their own creativity.

Historical settings

Different fiction genres place different demands on the writer when it comes to setting the scene. Take historical novels for example. Part of the joy of these stories is that they can also function as a sort of informal history lesson, providing a fascinating insight into how people used to live.

That is why it is so important to help your pupils make the settings as realistic as possible and include details that have a chance of informing as well as entertaining.

We can help here with our historical settings inspiration packs for KS2 pupils. Whether it’s Victorian Britain or the Wild West , these comprehensive resources provide all the images and inspiration your pupils will need to create a convincing backdrop for their stories set in these iconic times.

Beyond reality – creating your imaginary setting

Of course, not all stories are set in the real world. Although this gives writers more scope for letting their imaginations run free, they still need to have some form of containment – otherwise the reader will be just too bamboozled to read very far. That is when planning becomes particularly important.

Fantasy adventures , for example, are set in places that, although familiar in many respects, are in fact different worlds.

Therefore, the writer needs a clear idea of where each key location is placed in relation to the others, whether it is the hero’s village, the wizard’s tower or the monster’s lair. That is why so many of these tales include a map at the beginning.

Science fiction tales also contain the problem of creating a whole new universe, which is why they are often constrained to a limited range of locations, such as a particular planet or spaceship.

For both genres, we offer writing inspiration packs containing images, inspirational ideas and planning sheets to help your pupils create vivid settings for their stories.

Getting going with your descriptive writing

Whether it’s a short story, novel, non-fiction book, script or anything else, once they are happy with their plans, they still need to weave all the details into a coherent tale. Never underestimate how difficult it might be for children to pull all the elements together.

You might even find it necessary to provide more structured writing frames for when they ultimately start composing their stories. Nevertheless, with a good setting firmly embedded in their minds, at least they won’t be starting with a blank canvas.

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