What it is: Story Starters is a fun site for students in kindergarten through sixth grade to use each day as a quick writing activity. Students type in their name and select a grade to begin. Students are taken to a special Story Starter machine that generates writing ideas for newspaper articles, letters, notebooks, or postcards. They can get a new idea by keeping some elements of the idea and spinning again to change elements. The site also features Scholastic’s Word Wizard which always floats on the webpage. Students can type in a word or double click any word on the webpage and get a definition of the word.
How to integrate Scholastic Story Starters into the classroom: Scholastic Story Starters is a fun website to use with the whole class or as a writing learning center. This is a great site to use with an interactive whiteboard or projector to generate ideas for free creative writing time. Let students take turns being the ‘spinner’ that generates writing ideas. Encourage students to share their writing, it is neat to hear all the different ideas that kids come up with from the same story starter. This would be a great website to bookmark on classroom computers for students to visit as a writing center that they can visit when they are stumped for writing ideas.
Tips: You may have to spin a category a few times to get a story starter that makes sense. This is very quick and easy!
Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Scholastic Story Starters in your classroom.
Sometimes I cover the two middle wheels and have the kids use the beginning and end wheels and they use their own imaginations to fill in the middle wheels. This helps students to begin writing from their own experiences. This really works well with pairs or triples on the computer as the silly creative juices kick in. Soon even the most reluctant writers are getting involved in writing stories. Of course, doing this they need to ignore the writing prompt shown on the following screens.