Picture Writing Prompts

The Value of Picture Writing Prompts in the Primary Classroom

Are you looking for new and exciting ways to get your kids excited about writing and simple digital tools to add to your writing lesson plans? Picture prompts provide a visual stimulus for kids to create a story, which can help unleash their imagination and creative thinking skills.

The picture writing prompt generator is packed with 60 images to rotate through to keep students engaged with new stimuli that will spur creative writing. With a picture as a starting point, the widget provides students with a means to expand their vocabulary by describing the visual elements they see and creating characters and settings for their stories. Pick a picture at random for a tool you can deploy whether you’re teaching descriptive writing, storytelling, or even grammar.

How to Use Picture Writing Prompts

You can choose to see these visual writing prompts with or without text. Simply launch the widget, and click “Inspire Me” to randomly select a new image. Click hide or show to reveal some suggested sentence starters.

You can also select the ℹ️ icon in the top right corner to reveal some suggested lesson prompts for each image.

Lesson Ideas for Picture Writing Prompts

From helping students build their inferring and predicting skills to writing a poem, there are dozens of ways to get students to write with picture prompts! Here are a few suggestions from the teachers on the Teach Starter team!

Narrative Writing Prompt

The primary purpose of this teacher tool is to provide visual writing prompts to assist children with ideas and concepts for their narrative writing. You’ll get your students producing picture-perfect writing in no time with this collection of stunning photographs! Setting your students up for success when writing has never been easier.

Using Graphic Organisers

Using a photograph is a fantastic way to introduce and consolidate your students’ knowledge and understanding of a variety of graphic organisers. Print out copies of any of the following graphic organisers that would work really well with a visual stimulus:

• storyboard template
• y-chart graphic organiser
• visual literacy graphic organiser
• venn diagram graphic organiser
• five senses graphic organiser
• see, think, wonder graphic organiser

Write a Persuasive Text

Are you looking at persuasive writing at the moment with your students? Using a stunning photograph may just be what you are looking for to add some more depth to your students’ writing.

Pick a photograph from the collection of 60 images. As a class, you can brainstorm what is happening in the photo and come up with a collection of persuasive topics to write about. This gives your students ownership over their writing.

Poetry Inspiration

Poetry can be a really tricky concept to teach young kids. However, using real-life photographs can provide your students with some inspiration for the topic of their poem — which is often the part that they get stuck on. Set them up for success, and brainstorm the different ideas and concepts they could write about using a picture writing prompt as inspiration.

Practise Prediction and Inferring Skills

Basic predicting and inferencing skills can be easily practised using a simple picture. Display one of the photographs in the widget for your students to analyse, and ask some leading questions, to get them thinking in more detail about the photograph. Questions you could ask include:

• Where do you think this photograph has been taken? Why?
• What do you think is about to happen?
• Why do you think the dog is wet?
• What do you think just happened?
• Do you think this dog has an owner?
• What do you think will happen next?

Art Interpretation

When teaching different art elements to your children, use a picture prompt as inspiration to give students ideas of what to sketch, paint, or create.