Use creative story ideas for teaching narrative writing! Find out just how easy it is to use these short story writing tips.
Have you ever wondered why some teachers are just better at teaching children creative writing?
It seems their students do not struggle with how to write a narrative. They have loads of creative stories, and look forward to writing with their teacher.
Often it is because the teacher has strong background knowledge of the subject, understands the developmental skills of children as writers, they love to write themselves, and….
They have a secret weapon.
Okay, it’s really not a secret, but it really does make writing lessons more effective and the kids get so engaged.
Start with an interactive read-aloud that has a simple story structure kids can replicate, has a plot that kids relate to, and offers ways for students to get involved in the read aloud.
It works every time!
How to Write a Narrative Story
When you are teaching children creative writing, you need to have some great creative story ideas. I always like to use a book for the children to model their writing after, as many of them need the scaffolding a model provides in order to be successful.
It makes a huge difference if you try to base your lessons off of using mentor texts as models.
Be sure to choose a book that you can really use in teaching narrative writing. Something like…
There are a few different versions of the story, but it all comes down to these simple premises: a circle story that is very creative, fanciful, has all the elements of a story, and will be a novel approach to teaching creative writing.
Here’s how I teach creative story ideas with this book. This is a shared writing piece we did after we read the book aloud and prior to the students writing their own story.
This is the introduction to our narrative story.
Narrative elements are written into the introduction: characters, setting, problem and solution.
Notice that the fairy tale element of “Once upon a time…” is used.
The text is repetitive (in red) and the problem and solution is constantly changing.
Here’s the middle of our short story.
As you can see the creative story ideas really start to come out in the students’ ideas.
They had to continually problem solved to keep the plot flowing.
A new character is introduced as a protagonist: the ogre (we just called him the bad guy – easier for 7 and 8 year olds to comprehend!)
The story comes to a surprising conclusion with poor Bob being thrown in jail forever.
Many of the children wanted him to be “smushed” under the ogre’s feet, but they were redirected to find a more humane solution.
Some of the children felt that more explanation was needed about the giant ogre actually being a policeman.
That led to a mini-lesson on the use of parenthesis.