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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Adventure Storytelling Cubes & Writing Templates
Use our Adventure Storytelling Dice templates to create an engaging Book Week Writing Activity.
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Plan Your Own Adventure - Writing Template
Students use a template to help them plan stories with alternative pathways for their friends to read.
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Write a Short Story – The Discovery or Invention
Get your students analysing and writing an invention story with this engaging and fully scaffolded writing project booklet.
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Write a Short Story – Overcoming Obstacles
Get your students analysing and writing overcoming obstacles short stories with this engaging and fully scaffolded writing project booklet.
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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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Storytelling Cubes
Roll our Storytelling Cubes to generate fun narrative writing prompts to use in your classroom.
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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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'If I Were a Bowerbird...' Writing Stimulus
Get students thinking and writing about what they would collect, or what they would do if they were a bowerbird.
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Spring Writing Prompts
Celebrate Spring with Spring writing worksheets for the early years.
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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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Fairy Tale Setting and Book Characters Classroom Display
Teach fairy tales and narrative structure with a printable fairy tale setting poster and book characters for a classroom display.
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My Ideal World – Writing Template
A template for students to use when writing about their ideal world.
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The 5 Ws and 1 H Questions for Narrative Writing Poster
A 5 Ws and 1 H poster to display in the classroom.
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Picture Writing Prompts
Introducing the perfect picture writing prompts to encourage creative writing in your primary students! Explore 60 visual prompts made just for the primary classroom.
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Storytelling for Kids: Creative Ideas Teachers Can Use to Get Kids Writing
Teaching storytelling? Get students in the classroom excited with these storytelling ideas and activities for kids!