Tips to help with kids story writing

July 29th, 2008

I use the Fun Writing Game” (sold downloadable at $8.00 from this site) to get kids to enjoy writing. Some kids are natural writers and when given this game they blossom into little authors.
Others may struggle when it comes to writing more than a few sentences. Not many primary teachers actually teach story writing nowadays. Mostly kids are given an idea or a beginning and then told to write a story, project or an assignment. Some kids then freeze up and don’t know how to write enough.
So what do you do?

Tip 1

Well all assignments, stories etc are actually giving us information based on the following questions.

They are …

• What?
• Who?
• When?
• Where?
• How?
• Why?

The clearer the kid answers these questions the more s/he will write and the better marks s/he will get.

For example

If you were writing a story about a giant and a little girl then it would be good to know.
• who the giant was
• where he lived and came from
• what he looked like
• when the story took place
• why the giant was there
• what the little girl was like
• where she lived
• where the story took place
• what happened
• who her family was
• why they were doing what they were doing
• how it ended
• how it happened
• etc.

if you were writing a project on Romans it would be good to know:
• when they lived
• how they lived
• how they built
• what they believed in
• what they ate
• what the schools were like
• why you find them interesting
• where they lived
• who were the most important
• etc

Tip 2

Ask your child to describe what the main characters were like. I ask kids to think of 3 words describing each character - and they all have to be different.
Write each of these words down and spell them for him/her. Kids often play safe with words because they cannot spell them. Difficult words that they want to write can be put into their own fun personal dictionary (available free and downloadable from this site).
If they find this hard then ask them to base their character on someone or something they know.

Tip 3

Makes rules about word usage.

When children have spelling problems they tend to play safe with their lexicon. Here are a few ways to encourage them to use a broader vocabulary.
• Only allow “and” to be used twice in every sentence.
• Limit the use of some words such as “went”. “said’ and “big”. Before the kid starts the story work with him/her to get a list of alternative words to these. For example:
“Went” can be replaced by, drove, ran, walked, strolled, jumped, crawled, scampered, danced, cycled etc.

Tip 4

Some children do actually work better if listening to music at the same time. Be scientific. Test this out and see rather than just banning the music.

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Entry Filed under: Dyslexia, General, Freebie Tips