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.

1.  The story starter should hint at the theme of the story.
2. 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!
3. 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