Top Tips for Helping Children Write Stories
Maths and English worksheets for your child's year group, made by Sunita, an experienced UK primary school teacher. Print them at home and sit together for ten minutes.
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How can you encourage children to write better stories?
Tapping into children's interests is the best way to spark their imagination and inspire them to write their own exciting stories. Reading is always a good starting point. Whether it's adventure, fantasy, or mystery, helping them explore the characters, settings, and challenges they love will get their creativity flowing.
Guiding children through the story-writing process step by step will help them gather their ideas and thoughts before feeling over-whelmed with having to write a long story cold.
The steps primary children use include:
- brainstorming
- role play
- planning (this can be done using a storyboard, or using TMK Story Mountain plan)
- writing a first draft
- editing and improving
Each stage helps build a children's confidence as a writer. Many children find it difficult to write stories because they may not know how to gather their thoughts and ideas, or struggle to keep the story flow going to the end. Writing doesn’t always have to be perfect the first time. Encouraging children to brainstorm, plan and revise can help make their stories exciting.
Planning and writing a story can be made easier by using a storyboard. The ideas on your storyboard can then be used to draft out a story, which can then be made better (edited) for your final story. This english worksheet will be particularly useful to KS2 children, especially when they are planning a story narrative.
What is a storyboard? A storyboard can be used to help you plan a story. It shows what is going to happen in your story. You can tell your story using pictures and writing. Children need to make sure their story has a beginning, middle and end. You can use a story board by either drawing pictures to tell the story, or write sentences. Narration or speech bubbles can also be used.
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The final editing and improving phase brings the whole story together—fine-tuning sentences, improving the vocabulary used, checking grammar and adding more interest to the story. They can then be encouraged to try adding descriptive details and dialogue.
The story writing tips below will help children bring their story ideas to life, while helping to create a love for writing.
Top Story Writing Tips For Children
- Ask children what kind of stories they like to read. Why do they like these kind of stories? What kind of characters do they have in them? Where are these kinds of stories set? What kind of problems do the characters face and how are they resolved?
- Writing a story about something children are interested in helps. They can brainstorm their story ideas in a notebook.
- Encourage your child to plan their story. Use our TMK Essentials for a blank storyboard and story writing mountain. Join Teach My Kids to gain access to a whole year's worth of essential English worksheets to help improve children's writing .
- Ask children to write their story, using the ideas from their story plan. It doesn't have to be perfect at this stage, just let them write. They can change their ideas from the story plan whilst writing.
- Once children have finished their first draft of the story. Read what they have written back to them. Does it make sense and flow?
- Now ask them to go through their story, can they add more to it to make it more interesting or exciting? Can they add some adjectives, verbs or adverbs?
- Ask children to re-read their story again. Have they started their sentences in different ways? Have they used a mixture of short and long sentences (simple, compound and complex sentences)? Can they add some speech to their story?
- Checking spellings and punctuation is also a vital skill needed when editing and improving stories (capital letters, full stops, commas, exclamation marks etc.).
- The story is now ready to copy, or children can write their final draft of their story.
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Who makes the worksheets
Sunita
UK primary teacher
Every worksheet on Teach My Kids is made by Sunita, a UK primary school teacher with over ten years in the classroom. She writes each one by hand and maps it to the national curriculum, so what your child practises at home lines up with what they do at school. It's all on paper, not a screen, and takes about ten minutes a day.
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Common questions
Questions parents ask
- What is the difference between a verb and an adverb?
- A verb is the action or doing word, like run, think or jump. An adverb describes that verb and tells you how, when or where it happened, like quickly, yesterday or outside.
- How can I help my child with writing at home?
- Talk the idea through before they pick up a pencil. Planning out loud takes the pressure off the blank page. Keep the pieces short, praise one thing they did well, then let them read it back to you.
- What is a story mountain?
- A story mountain is a simple plan that splits a story into five parts: the opening, the build-up, the problem, the resolution and the ending. It helps a child see the shape of a story before they start writing.
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