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Creative writing and fiction

Enjoying a wide range of fiction and being able to write stories are core primary school literacy objectives. In this section you'll find lots of expert advice as well as fun and engaging creative writing resources to encourage your child to write their own stories and develop their phonics , grammar and reading skills.

Fire your child's imagination with these creative writing resources for your child

Explore a range of unique resources to help your child develop their creative writing skills. Find out how creative writing is taught in school and discover ways to inspire your child to inject that special spark into their story writing. You'll also find worksheets that focus on the creative writing objectives and skills for each school year, including how to structure a story, express character feeling and improving descriptions by adding powerful verbs.

We also have planning frames, story templates and writing tasks for each school year, and if you want even more engaging and in-depth resources to encourage your budding author, download our KS1 and KS2 creative writing toolkits! You'll also find out how reading and writing are assessed , what reading schemes are and how to foster a love of reading that will last your child a lifetime.

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Children have such amazing imaginations and make up stories all the time. Encouraging them to write them down can be more of a challenge though! To encourage the budding writer in your home to put pen to paper, why not look at these:

• Story writing planning cards
• Writing an adventure story
• Adventure story starter
• Describing a story setting
• Dilemma story starter
• Understanding story maps
• Completing a story map
• Introduction to story characters
• Empathising with story characters

Storytelling: building the next generation of fiction writers

• Storytelling for Early Years Foundation Stage children
• Storytelling support for KS1 children
• Storytelling ideas for KS2

Encourage budding authors with our KS1 and KS2 creative writing toolkits!

Bursting with fill-in prompt sheets and inspiring ideas to get even the most reluctant writer started, the KS1 Creative Writing Toolkit is the perfect way to encourage children aged 5 to 7 to put pen to paper. And if your KS2 child longs to write stories, download our KS2 Creative Writing Toolkit , packed with gorgeously-illustrated pages to write on, is what you need to inspire them.

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Creative Writing Worksheets K-2

• The Parts of a Letter
• Write Your Own Mad Libs ®
• Fill-in Story: The Halloween Party
• Fill-in Halloween Story: A Scary Night
• Fill-in Story: Halloween Carnival
• My Friend Writing Printable
• Life in the Sea
• Favorite Foods
• How to Write a Haiku
• Getting to Know Me
• Teacher's Guide to Cam Jansen Mysteries
• Make Your Own Holiday
• A Note About Witches: Fill-in-the-Blanks
• Writing a Persuasive Letter (Gr. 2)
• Writing a Letter to Persuade (Gr. 1)
• How to Guyku (Poem Template)
• The Main Idea
• A Visit to Outer Space Writing Activity
• An April Fools' Joke-Off
• Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp Activity Kit
• My New Year's Resolutions (K-2)
• Plan a Holiday
• Curious George: An Acrostic Poem
• Take a Train Ride
• Science and Language Arts: Moon Story
• My Curious George Story
• The Sky's the Limit
• If I Had a Gorilla, Then...
• Happy and Sad Frogs
• More Creative Writing Printables, K-2

Featured 2nd Grade Resources

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Tes primary English resources has an unrivalled range of teaching ideas for creative writing activities. Breathe new life into your lesson plans for KS1 and KS2 with our resources and materials, including: - Creative writing worksheets and activities - Writing activities - Storytelling projects And that's just the beginning! All Tes primary teaching resources are created by teachers, for teachers and have been successfully tried and tested in KS1 and KS2 classrooms.

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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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Powerful Verbs KS2 Features of Writing Worksheets KS2

Resource Collection Effective Writing

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Support pupils in KS2 to explore more ambitious vocabulary for their own writing using the activities provided in this resource pack. Each task – understand, explain, challenge, test, apply – explores how choosing more powerful synonyms for everyday verbs can change the meaning of a sentence, and give writing more impact.

Perfect for home learning, as an exercise before an independent writing task, or as a way to challenge more able learners in lower year groups, the worksheets are bright and engaging, using eye-catching images to fire children’s imaginations, and giving them the opportunity to apply their knowledge in creative writing activities.

This primary resource is divided into five sections:

• Understand Match common verbs with a more-powerful alternative, write powerful verb alternatives for words, and change the verbs in the example sentences for more-powerful ones
• Explain Read the pairs of sentences and describe the effect that the more-powerful verb has in each. Then change the verbs in the given sentences and explain what effect that has
• Challenge Write two sentences about each of the images shown. The first should have a common verb, then the second should have a powerful verb
• Test Add powerful verbs to fill in the blanks in sentences, and underline the powerful verbs in a passage. Next, create a sentence for each of the powerful verbs given
• Apply Write a short story about the image provided, using plenty of powerful verbs

What is a powerful verb?

If verbs describe an action, a powerful verb is a more interesting version of basic verbs that help to make writing more descriptive, exciting and engaging. Learning these will help expand children’s vocabularies and improve their speaking and writing skills.

Powerful verb examples

• Sprinted , galloped or strode instead of ran
• Shouted , whispered or muttered instead of said
• Searched , eyeballed or perused instead of looked
• Snoozed , slumbered or dozed instead of slept

Powerful verb list

National curriculum english programme of study links.

Year 3/4 Writing - composition

Pupils should be taught to evaluate and edit by assessing the effectiveness of their own and others’ writing and suggesting improvements

Year 5/6 Writing - composition

Pupils should be taught to evaluate and edit by proposing changes to vocabulary, grammar and punctuation to enhance effects and clarify meaning

This resource is part of the Effective Writing collection. View more from this collection

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