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Spring Stories! Spring Preschool Story Prompts

February 24, 2020 by Selena Robinson Leave a Comment

Spring Preschool Story Prompts - Look! We're Learning!
These spring preschool story prompts are an easy way to help preschoolers start writing creatively!
Encourage your preschoolers to express themselves with these spring preschool story prompts!
>These spring preschool story prompts are such a fun way to get young children writing!

Piglet and I have been working on her handwriting and phonics skills for months, so I thought she’d have a little fun trying her hand at creative writing.

And spring is a great time to be creative!

Naturally, I thought she’d enjoy some of her own spring worksheets for kids: these new printable spring preschool story prompts!

Fun Spring Early Creative Writing Prompts

Helping kids learn to write about their thoughts and guesses at a young age is a good way to help them write without fear later on.

These printable preschool writing prompts can help.

Read on to see how to get your own copy of these spring writing printables!

And, for more spring learning fun for early learners, don’t miss our Birds and Bugs Playdough Mats for Preschoolers!

Pick up these spring themed early creative writing prompts to help students practice composing stories about spring!

Spring Stories! Spring Preschool Story Prompts

To use these early creative writing prompts, you’ll need the following: (This post contains affiliate links. For details, see our Disclosure Policy.)

  • Printer (with ink)
  • Printer paper
  • Pencils (Side note: I’ve never really used the larger primary pencils for my preschoolers, but they may be helpful if your child is working on pencil grip skills.)

Spring Story Prompts for Preschoolers

The prompts include four different scenarios for preschoolers to write about.

Printable Spring Creative Writing Prompts

They can write and draw about their favorite thing about spring.

They can write and draw about their favorite spring animal.

Spring Themed Creative Writing Prompts

They can express what they like to do in spring.

And, to get more specific, they can write or draw about what they want to do this spring.

Plus, they can draw a picture of what they think could happen afterwards. Let’s see these in action!

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How to Use Early Creative Writing Prompts with Kids

As an English major, creative writing is one of my passions.

There’s just something about putting pencil to paper (or fingers to keyboards, these days) and starting off down a road of creative thought.

Preschool Spring Writing Prompts

You kind of have an idea of where you’d like to go, but you’re always surprised at the things you come up with along the way.

Writing Stories for Preschoolers

The same is true with little writers!

Open-ended questions give them a chance to put their imaginations to work. And, after all, writing without imagination is like…like…not writing at all.

Each of these spring creative writing prompts has a line for kids to finish the sentence. At the bottom, there’s a box for them to draw a picture of what they wrote.

Spring Preschool Prompts

This spring, Piglet wants to play basketball. That’s her shooting the ball into the hoop in the picture.

Writing about Spring with Preschoolers

I will say that I had to read the sentence out to her and help her spell the words. The rest she did herself.

Working on Story Predictions with Preschoolers

After each initial prompt is a second page asking kids to write what they think will happen next.

This is a simple way to introduce creative writing to preschoolers: ask them to come up with an image and then predict what might happen afterward.

Completed Preschool Story Prompts

Piglet’s answer to what will happen after she plays basketball was: “Bounces”.

Naturally, she drew a picture of the ball bouncing after falling through the net.

Working on Storywriting with Preschoolers

Hmmm….what to do next? Color the pictures!

Coloring Completed Story Prompts

And that’s what she did. She was so proud of her work that she gave her masterpieces to her older siblings.

This was a fun (and quick) language arts lesson for her.

We spent about 15 minutes on one of the prompts and she got to practice handwriting, creative writing, art, phonics, and spelling – all in one activity!

Scroll down to get your printable Spring Preschool Story Prompts!

Don’t miss these other spring learning printables!

These simple bird species identification cards are fun for learning about common bird species during spring! Use them with early grades science lessons!

This printable rainbow tally marks lesson for early learners is a great way to teach students how to count with tally marks!

Grab these fun busy bee scissor skills printables to help little ones practice using scissors!

To get your copy of our Spring Preschool Story Prompts, click the image or the link below to grab the product from my Teachers Pay Teachers store!

Early Creative Writing Prompts for Spring

>>> Spring Early Creative Writing Prompts – Teachers Pay Teachers <<<

These spring themed early creative writing prompts are perfect for spring writing lessons!

This post is part of the Homeschool Writing Prompts linkup at iHomeschool Network! Stop by to get more fun writing prompts for your students from my fellow bloggers!

Homeschool Writing Prompts

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Filed Under: Homeschooling Printables, Teaching Printables Tagged With: creative writing, creative writing for preschoolers, ela, prek, preschool creative writing, preschool story prompts, preschool writing prompts, spring, spring preschool story prompts, spring story prompts, spring worksheets, spring worksheets for kids, spring writing prompts, writing, writing for preschoolers

Travel Tales! Vacation Creative Writing Activity for Kids

July 22, 2019 by Selena Robinson Leave a Comment

It’s already back to school season. Can you believe it?

Personally, I’ve had a wonderful summer break and I am not in any way ready to get back to class. I have a pretty strong hunch my kids feel the same way.

But, like it or not, summer is coming to an end. So, I thought it would be a little easier to get back to ELA with this easy creative writing activity about summer vacation!

Simple Vacation Creative Writing Activity for Kids

We usually take a vacation each summer. This year, we went camping for the first time. And we didn’t die!

My kids had a lot to say about that trip, but I also wanted to encourage them all to write about it, including my younger learners. 

This simple vacation-themed creative writing prompt is great, because it’s a bite-sized lesson. So if you have reluctant writers, they won’t be intimidated by it at all.

Read on to see how to get your copy for free! And, for more fun with ELA, don’t miss my Donut Colors Sentence Writing Activity!

Help students write about places they have visited or want to visit with this simple vacation creative writing activity!

Travel Tales! Vacation Creative Writing Activity for Kids

To use this vacation creative writing activity, you’ll need the following: (This post contains affiliate links. For details, see our Disclosure Policy.)

  • Printer (with ink)
  • Cardstock
  • Pencils
  • Child-safe scissors (optional)
  • Colored pencils (optional)

Vacation Story Writing Prompt

This activity includes five pages of prompts: four with different colors and a line art version. 

Summer Vacation Creative Writing Activity for Kids

I found it best to print it on cardstock, because I wanted kids to be able to cut out their finished writing and hang it up on the wall.

Vacation Creative Writing Activity

If you use the line art version, kids can color in the suitcase themselves!

Vacation Creative Writing Activity for Early Writers

Students can use this activity to describe their actual vacations or to write about places they’d like to go. And, since it’s evergreen, you can use it any time there’s a school break, including, fall, winter, and spring. 

Scroll down to get your copy of our Vacation Creative Writing Activity!

Take a look at these other ways to learn with ELA!

Help early writers practice naming colors and writing complete sentences with this donut colors sentence writing activity! Perfect for literacy centers!

Teach children how to identify basic nouns, verbs, and adjectives with this winter-themed parts of speech sorting activity! Perfect for ELA over the winter!

Pick up these printable punctuation flashcards to help kids memorize common punctuation marks in ELA!

Follow my Language Arts for Kids board on Pinterest for more ideas!

Help students break into creative writing with this simple vacation creative writing activity! Perfect for telling about summer break or places they want to visit!

To get your free copy of Travel Tales! Vacation Creative Writing Activity for Kids, click the image or the text below to visit my Teachers Pay Teachers Store!

Vacation Creative Writing Activity for Kids

>>> Travel Tales! Vacation Creative Writing Activity <<<

Filed Under: Homeschooling Printables, Language Arts Tagged With: creative writing, ela, homeschool printables

Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review

September 7, 2015 by Selena Robinson 2 Comments

Creative writing is one of the most difficult subjects I’ve ever had to teach in our homeschool. I was an English major in college and I love the writing process, but letting go of what English “should” sound and look like has been a real issue for me personally, so it’s hard for me to teach my kids to write freely.

So I was thrilled to get a chance to post a Brave Writer review after trying the program’s Faltering Ownership for fifth grade creative writing! In fact, I loved Brave Writer so much that it’s going to be our creative writing program for this homeschool year!

Check out our review to see how we used Brave Writer to make creative writing accessible and fun!

*Disclosure: I received access to this resource in exchange for this post. All opinions are my own and I was not required to post a positive review.*

Fifth Grade Creative Writing - Brave Writer Review

The Faltering Ownership Philosophy

For fifth grade, we used “Faltering Ownership”, the Brave Writer program that’s geared toward 11-12 year olds. I was a little puzzled by the title until I read the introduction to the program, but it turns out that the title fits the program perfectly!

As Julie explains in the intro, middle school is the time when children begin to “take the wheel” of the writing process. It’s kind of like giving your child the keys to the car for the first time and riding in the passenger seat as they drive.

They make turns you’re not expecting and the loss of control can be unnerving for parents, but the experience is essential for kids so that they can take ownership, even if it’s faltering, over their own direction. And Julie applies that analogy to writing.

In middle grades, kids need to develop more confidence in their writing ability. As parents, we shift from teachers to consultants, giving our children direction but also instilling them with confidence to write what they feel. And that means letting them learn to look at language differently.

Once I read the introduction to the program, I had a new outlook on what it means to teach creative writing, even though I’ve already finished a degree in English! So Brave Writer taught me quite a lot as well. 🙂

Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review

We jumped right in with the activities in month 1 – Word Collecting and Building.

Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review - Look! We're Learning!

One of the first monthly exercises in “Faltering Ownership” is to collect words and learn to use them as building blocks for writing prompts and expressions. Tigger started off by listening to television shows and conversations, as well as by reading signs, snippets of books that were lying nearby, and product labels in stores.

Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review - Look! We're Learning!

Once she filled several pages of paper with various words, she copied them onto trimmed pieces of index cards.

Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review - Look! We're Learning!

As you can see, we ended up with quite a lot. She really liked collecting those words.

Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review - Look! We're Learning!

When we had all of our index cards completed, it was time to group the words into piles. In Faltering Ownership, the instructions are quite liberal, so Tigger could group the words however she wanted: alphabetically, adjective/noun pairs, similar topics, or any other way she could think of.

Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review - Look! We're Learning!

We aimed for about six or seven words per pile.

Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review - Look! We're Learning!

Then she started matching them up to create two-word phrases. Faltering Ownership suggested pasting the words on household objects, so we started with our homeschooling space: the dining room.

Craftsy
Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review - Look! We're Learning!

From the random word pairings, we got some great phrases, including “fuzzy television”,

Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review - Look! We're Learning!

“teetering library”,

Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review - Look! We're Learning!

…and “beautiful friendship”. Awww… 🙂

Fifth Grade Creative Writing: Brave Writer Review - Look! We're Learning!

After creating another phrase “cheeky station”, Tigger wrote a short story:

A Land Where Objects Talk

“You should go to Weirdoland. Objects talk, flowers and trees dance, and MUCH MORE. For instance, one day the sun said, “I will shine.” The clouds said, “We will glide.” A grumpy train pulled in. “You’re the grumpiest object I’ve ever seen!”, laughed a cheeky station. “STOP!” snapped the grumpy train. (Psst…they’ve never gotten along.)”

Faltering Ownership recommended asking students how their perspective on language has changed after completing the word building activity. When I asked Tigger, she wrote down her answer:

“Before when I learned language, especially in school, I used to think that language was easy. Now I’m learning that sometimes you have to think about some things. And guess what? IT’S NOT BORING!”

She’s absolutely right. Creative writing is not boring, especially when you can learn to look at words differently and free your mind to use them in new ways.

How to Use Faltering Ownership

Faltering Ownership is designed to be used along with The Writer’s Jungle, the focal point of the Brave Writer curriculum. The Writer’s Jungle is a homeschooling creative writing course that is geared toward parents. 

It’s a complete overview of language arts in general – from narration and freewriting to editing and publishing. If you’re unsure where to begin when you’re teaching creative writing, The Writer’s Jungle is basically a guided journey through teaching language arts to your kids.

Since Faltering Ownership is a year-long curriculum, there are exercises for an entire year of creative writing. Naturally, we began with Month 1: Wild Words, but the program continues for 9 months more, covering topics such as historical writing and composing reports. There are also two bonus activities, in case you teach year-round or just want to round out your program with more activities.

Faltering Ownership is based on three core segments: language arts, oral language, and writing projects. One of the things I’m truly enjoying about the program is its emphasis on appreciating language in general before beginning to write. So children can learn to use copywork, narration, and dictation (core components of the Charlotte Mason approach) as keys to examining literature. These are great stepping stones to building their own creativity for what they’ll write later.

Plus, the ebook is beautifully laid out, complete with pictures, diagrams, and prompts. All of the instructions are included for each activity, so you don’t have to be an expert on teaching English before you begin. I can’t tell you how much of a help that was, especially when you’re teaching kids with ADHD and you need to get a lesson done before their attention span goes out the window. 🙂

We can’t wait to use Brave Writer for our fifth grade creative writing program to see how much further we can stretch our writing muscles! If you’re interested in trying Faltering Ownership or another one of the Brave Writer programs, you can save 10 percent on your purchase with the code iHomeschoolDiscount. This code is valid through September 21, 2015 only.

To learn more about Brave Writer, visit the program’s website or keep up with Brave Writer on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram!

Filed Under: 2015-16 Curriculum, Curriculum Reviews, Homeschool Curriculum, Language Arts Tagged With: creative writing, fifth grade, fifth grade curriculum, homeschool curriculum, language arts

Hi! I'm Selena, a teacher and a veteran homeschool mom to four. I'm so glad you're here!
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