Picture Prompts for Writing

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Picture Prompts Inspire Writing

Here’s a fun way to get your kids to write – and it’s VERY easy!  Use homemade picture prompts.  Simply cut out interesting pictures from magazines, old calendars, old books, etc. and paste them on card stock.  Let your child choose a picture, then write a story that goes along with it.  Easy peasy!

An Example

Here’s the picture Mahayla chose this week.  Before we began, I chose a picture and orally told a story with lots of detail so she would see that I was looking for a story rather than a description of the picture.  I encouraged her to tell her story orally, too, before writing it in order to get her thoughts flowing.

“The Mischievous Dog”

Once on a sunny day in May, a girl named Kiri was filling up a tub to give her dog, Perry, bath.  When finally she was ready, Kiri called her dog Perry really loud so she was sure he would hear her.  But, alas, Perry would not come.  Where could he be?

Kiri checked everywhere, until finally she spotted him.  He was running towards his dog house.  Kiri ran after him.  She found Perry lying on the floor of his dog house pretending he was asleep.  But Kiri knew better!  She stepped outside and waited for him to peek out.  Very soon he did, so she caught him by the collar and drug him to the tub.

After a lot of fighting with him, she finally finished the bath!  Right then, Perry ran straight for his dog house.  Kiri just looked at him and sighed.

We have a long way to go on filling up a story with many more details, but she’s made leap and bound strides in adding interesting adjectives and keeping her thoughts organized.  Once a child is able to start thinking in an organized way and knows why it’s important to add details that keep the reader interested, the stories begin to get longer almost automatically.  The program we started using last year that helped build better, more interesting sentences is called Igniting Your Writing: 24 Sessions to Enliven and Inspire Young Writers.  I highly recommend it!

Other creative writing ideas:

• Field Trip Notebooks
• Published Books
• Writing and Computer Skills
• School Newsletters

Check out my Pinterest writing board, too!