18 Best Writing Prompts for Kids (+ Story & Character Generators)
This post may contain affiliate links.
Want to get your kids writing? Give these fun writing prompts for kids to help your growing writers discover ideas and inspiration for writing. These fantastic books and online story and character prompts will help.
In elementary school, students start writing as early as kindergarten and continue growing in their writing abilities.
Best Writing Prompts for Kids
Story Generator Prompts
The best thing about Storymatic Kids! storytelling prompts are the amazing (and seemingly endless) combinations that push you to think creatively. It’s our favorite oral storytelling game and very useful in writing fictional stories as well.Buy it.
2. EeBoo Storytelling Cards
We own all the sets of eeBoo Story Cards because they’re WONDERFUL for storytelling! Mix and match to find plot, characters, and story elements for your own unique story. We love these visual writing prompts!
3. Scholastic Story Starters
To get the writing prompt, enter the type of story you want, choosing from adventure, fantasy, sci-fi, or scrambler. Then, enter your name and grade to get fun and changeable ideas. Switch one or more parts of the story by spinning the wheel. the writing prompt I got was: Describe the bedroom of a laughing acrobat who hikes the biggest forest in the world.
4.Build-a-Story Cards Ocean Adventure by Barefoot Books
Use these colorful ocean-themed illustrations as a writing prompt for kids. Tell stories focusing on the story elements (characters, setting, objects). You might also hunt for shapes, count things on the cards, make a mathematical word problem, or look for patterns. Ultimately, there are SO many possibilities, the least of which are storytelling and writing. Lucious, diverse illustrations!
5. The Amazing Story Generator
Flip through this story prompt book and choose different settings, characters, and plot ideas. It’s an easy-to-use book of writing prompts for kids. My full review is here. Buy The Amazing Story Generator here.
6. Mrs. Wordsmith’s Storyteller’s Illustrated Dictionary
This deluxe, illustrated storytelling dictionary gets kids jazzed about words with over 1,000 words illustrated in entertaining cartoons. Flip through the dictionary to get ideas for a story. Because whether you start with settings or characters or weather, in any section your creativity will immediately kick in. Buy it.
7. Children’s Writing Exercises
This writing prompt for kids generates the first sentence of a story. I generated: He had never seen anyone come out of the old house — until now. It’s an easy way to write a story by randomly generating a “First Line for a Story”!
8. Writing Prompts from Educators Online
Character Names & Ideas Generator
1. Random Name Generator
This is a fun site because you can pick out gender, ethnicity, and if you want the name to be mythological, ancient, biblical, fantasy, and others. I picked an Icelandic female and got the name: Nanna Ástríður.
2. RanGen
There are lots of cool options on this site! RanGen lets you find motives for your characters. I just did one and got: Driven by disillusionment, their goal is to live quietly without further trouble. This character prompt also has a character appearance generator where you can pick gender, type (unique, anime, realistic), and level of detail (simple, detailed).
3. D&D 5e Random Character Generator
You’ll get so many choices of D&D characters in this generator. Even if you’re not interested in D&D, you can use some of these ideas to create your own unique characters from different species with their own background stories.
This unique D&D site lists fantasy names, pop culture names, and more, including names for lizardfolk, yeti, unicorns, and bug species.
Journal Writing Prompts for Kids
These writing books and sites for kids are meant for journal writing, expository writing prompts, daily writing prompts, and/or fiction writing.
1. Journal Sparks
This book gives children both art and writing inspiration with ideas and prompts. Buy it.
2. Image and Imagination: Ideas and Inspiration for Teen Writers
The book of writing prompts is filled with gorgeous photographs, beautiful design, and interesting writing prompts. What’s more, I think it can be used for writers of all ages, not just teens. Read more. Buy it.
3. Creative Writing Prompts
Click on a number to get one of the hundreds of prompts. #49 is: What do you do on a rainy day? Write about it in 250 words.
4. Fifteen Minutes of Fiction
This site offers weekly writing prompts. I dislike the cluttered way the site is set up, though.
5. My Pinterest Board of Ideas
Find many writing prompts for kids on this Pinterest board.
6. Printable Journal Starters
Unlike stories, journal writing allows children to share and reflect on their real daily lives. It’s a great way to process emotions and memorialize the big and little events of daily life. In journals, kids can write about a favorite sport, write a poem, list favorite animals, describe a favorite holiday memory, share a favorite season, or explain the video games they like.
Follow Melissa Taylor @ImaginationSoup’s board Writing prompts for kids on Pinterest.
You Might Also Like:
Picture Books You Can Use as Writing Prompts
