Story Starters Teaching Resources
Explore story starters for kids created by teachers for teachers like you to encourage creative writing in the primary classroom.
This collection of narrative prompts has been designed by the Teach Starter teacher team to help you help your students as they perfect their narrative story writing skills. Aligned with the Australian literacy curriculum, the collection is packed with options for starting sentences and stories, as well as writing stimulus sheets you can use to encourage young writers to unleash their creativity!
Is this your first year teaching writing lessons? Or maybe you're just looking for some fresh ideas to incorporate story starters into your lesson plans? Read on for a primer from our teacher team!
What Are Story Starters?
The name may say it all — or maybe not! A story starter is a sentence or a short phrase that's created to spark the imaginations of your students and help them kick off a story.
These short bits of text provide students with an example of how to begin their story. They stimulate students' imaginations and help beat back writer's block!
They also go by a number of other names, including:
- Narrative starters
- Narrative prompts
- Story prompts
- Story openers
Is a Story Starter the Same as a Writing Prompt?
Story starters can be considered writing prompts. After all, these phrases or sentences work to prompt a student to continue the narrative.
But not every writing prompt is a story starter! A writing prompt provides our students with ideas that they can use to begin writing, but the words of the prompt do not have to appear within the actual text of the story.
A good story starter, on the other hand, will actually function as the first few words or sentences of a story.
What Makes a Good Story Starter?
When our teaching team sits down to craft a good story starter to add to our collection — and for you to add to your lesson plans — we have a few criteria in mind.
- The story starter should hint at the theme of the story.
- The story opener should not provide students with too much information — the goal is to leave it to students to craft major story details using their own imaginations!
- The story starter should hook the reader by revealing an intriguing element of the story.
Some of the elements we like to include in our story starters include:
- Questions
- An introduction to a particular character or characters
- Descriptions of the setting
- Dialogue
- Action
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Narrative Sentence Starter Worksheets
Use our printable narrative writing prompt worksheets to boost your students' imaginative writing skills.
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Narrative Writing Visual Prompts Presentation
A 19 slide teaching presentation containing visual narrative writing prompts.
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Imaginative Writing Topics for Easter
Inspire creativity with these 3 imaginative writing topics—fun Easter story prompts your students will love.
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Easter Writing Prompts - Differentiated Worksheets
Inspire your early year students to get writing with these easy to use Easter writing prompts.
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Story Ideas – Character, Setting, and Complication Cards
Help your students choose a topic to write about with this set of 36 character, setting and compilation task cards.
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5 Narrative Writing Stimulus Sheets
Writing stimulus sheets with a narrative focus.
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Seven Sensational Story Starters PowerPoint
Inspire creative and catching narrative story starters with this story starters set of teaching slides.
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Narrative Prompts Posters
A set of 20 posters to display as narrative story prompts for students.
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Easter Writing Prompts for Narrative Writing
Inspire creativity and build writing stamina with these engaging Easter-themed Writing Prompts for Narrative Writing.
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Daily Writing Prompts Calendars - Upper Primary
Inspire your students and encourage them to write regularly with a set of printable Daily Writing Prompts in calendar format.
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Fairy Tales Settings Posters
A set of 6 fairytale story settings background posters.
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Genre of the Month - Writing Prompt Grids (Upper)
Introduce your students to a variety of writing genres with our printable genre-specific writing prompt grids.
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Easter Diary Writing Activity
A cute diary entry writing activity.
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Topic Sentence Starter Cards
A pack of 32 narrative, persuasive and report writing sentence starter cards.
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Narrative Setting Prompts Posters
A set of 2 posters giving ideas for the setting of a narrative.
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Sentence Strip Activity Cards - Simple Sentence Starters
Encourage conversation and writing with our Printable Sentence Starter Prompts for Early Years.
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Magical Story Starters Task Cards
Get your students writing magical stories with this set of story starter task cards.
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My Monster Story Template
Use this simple story template to get your students writing simple narratives based on a sequence of events.
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Gold Miners' Bulletin Project
A creative writing newspaper project in which students design and write the front page of an imagined newspaper from the Australian Gold Rush era.
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Grandparents' Day Writing Prompt - The Very Best Day
Surprise Grandma and Grandpa with a special story telling about the Best Day Ever with a Grandparents’ Day writing prompt.
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Mysterious Story Setting Background Posters
A set of 3 mysterious story setting posters for students to use in a variety of ways.
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5 Ws and 1 H Planning Worksheet for Narrative Writing
A 5 Ws and 1 H worksheet to use in the classroom.
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Storytelling Cubes
Roll our Storytelling Cubes to generate fun narrative writing prompts to use in your classroom.
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Inspiring Story Starters Task Cards
Get your students writing inspiring stories with this set of story starter task cards.
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Haunted House Worksheets - Descriptive Writing Activity
Draw and write about scary Halloween houses with a printable Halloween descriptive writing activity pack.
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What Happened Next? The Three Little Pigs Writing Template
Finish The Three Little Pigs story in your own words.
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Alphabet Characters Story Generator Cards
A set of cards using alphabet-related image prompts for writing.
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Story Building Dice Activity
A set of 3 dice to use when to generating ideas for creative writing.
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Objects in the Sky – Writing Prompts
Describe objects in the sky, such as the clouds, moon and sun, with this set of 8 space science writing prompts.
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Roll to Create a Silly Book Title – Differentiated Writing Activity
Print a differentiated literacy activity using dice and a chart to create a silly book title and storybook.
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Novel Study - Alternate Story Ending Worksheet
A worksheet which encourages students to write an alternate ending to a shared class story.
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'Pick Three' Writing Inspiration Worksheet
A worksheet to use when students need writing inspiration for a narrative piece.