Lots of teachers dread creative writing for older students because they lack great kick-off activities. These intriguing printables can be laminated and used again and again, for fill-in single lesson activities, or as part of a creative writing suite attached to another topic. Creative writing clubs and groups will love them as warm-up activities, and teachers (or students) can take a pack of prompts and design creative writing games around them.

Prompts are all different and can be used to teach discrete aspects of narrative like characterisation, description, dialogue, plot-points, action, and elements of language.

The prompts suit differentiated activities for strong and weak students. Establish your own parameters like word limit or text type and allow students to do timed or untimed work with the prompts. They can swap, or even ask fellow students to guess which prompt generated their work.

Specimen answers for each prompt will soon be available as well, to demonstrate how much is possible from a simple prompt card!

This card can be used to prompt a brainstorming activity.