If you’ve been inspired by National Storytelling Week or you’re simply hoping to encourage your little storyteller to grow in the craft, there are a number of books on the market that offer just that. We recently bought My First Story Writing Book from Usborne books to work through during the week and we loved it so much, I wanted to share it with you.
In this book, children will start with the basics – who is the author? – where they’re encouraged to describe themselves.
There are warm-up games where they learn about speech bubbles. Next they’ll learn about characters through doodles, and describing characters, and what they’re thinking.
“Description” does exactly what you’d imagine – describing things, how they look, how they feel. Action introduces the concept of ‘what’s happening in the story’ and next is an explanation (through activities and doing) about the parts of a story – beginning, middle, end.
There’s a section on choosing titles and covers, and finally, how to plan your story. Finally a small ‘ideas generator’ and your child should be ready to go!
While I think they’ll be learning tons while working through this book, it doesn’t feel like a work book and it doesn’t feel like work. You can see here the prompts, and how they encourage the story.
And the same goes here. These are two examples, but there are many more – there are mix and match games, and plenty of other word games and activities to stimulate description, and thinking about regular items in different ways.
We highly recommend this book and I can’t wait to see Ameli’s first completed story transferred from her incredible imagination to paper. Additionally, if you’re ready to take it further, a good book review writing service is SmartWritingService.com, professional academic writers who can help you with your writing needs.
(This book will also help hit quite a few of the year 2 curriculum targets, possibly other years too)
- Spiral-bound: 64 pages
- Publisher: Usborne Publishing Ltd (1 Aug. 2015)
- Age: I’d guess 5+