Simple writing activities for primary students

Are you looking for fresh ideas and simple writing activities to mix up your writing lessons? 

Coming up with ideas for a week’s worth of writing lessons, let alone a full term, is hard work. With everything you have to juggle on a daily basis, wouldn’t it be nice for someone to just lighten your load?

We’ve picked some of our favourite resources from our newly released writing manuals and Seven Steps Teacher Hub to help get students’ creative juices flowing.

4 simple writing activities

• Planning a narrative text
• Bring facts to life in informative writing
• Engaging people’s emotions in persuasive writing
• Persuasive writing game to boost engagement

Planning a narrative text

Step 1: Plan for Success

Planning a narrative is complex – not only do you need a great idea, you also need to come up with a central problem, characters, settings, a great start and an exciting ending. 

Brainstorming Ideas

Teach your students to get into the habit of brainstorming lots of ideas. Your first idea is never your best. Ideally, they should brainstorm at least 10 ideas to get that one great story idea.

Have a go at developing students’ brainstorming skills using this Action Activity from the new Narrative Writing Manual. 

Here are five more one-word writing prompts for you to print and use in your classroom.

Bring facts to life in informative writing

Step 2: Sizzling Starts

The introduction to an informative text needs to give the reader a quick insight into the topic but most importantly it needs to make the reader curious, challenged or fascinated so they want to keep reading.

It’s time to show your students how to have fun with facts!

Action Activity: Fascinating Facts

This Sizzling Starts activity from the new Informative Manual helps students to write engaging informative introductions by using a fascinating fact and a Sizzling Start technique together to hook the reader.

New to Step 2: Sizzling Starts? Head to our Sizzling Starts page to learn the theory and techniques before you start this activity.

See this activity in action!

Watch Seven Steps teacher Catherine Grimwade run this activity with her class. See how she adapts the activity using a dice to decide which Sizzling Starts technique to tie with the chosen fact.

Try this activity with your students

• Head to the National Geographic Kids website to find a range of interesting facts.

• In pairs, get students to pick their favourite fact and brainstorm how they could team up the fact with one of these Sizzling Starts techniques:
  • Start with a sound
  • Start with action
  • Ask a question
  • Start with dialogue
  • Paint a word picture
  • Tell an anecdote.

• Give each pair a copy of the ‘Tie a Fact to a Technique’ template. Students work together to write a short Sizzling Start (2–3 sentences) for an informative text based on their chosen fact. Repeat this activity using different facts and techniques.

This activity and template has been extracted from the Informative Writing Manual. 

Seven Steps members can access an editable version of the template on Teacher Hub: Editable Tie a Fact to a Technique template

Engaging people’s emotions in persuasive writing

Step 5: Show, Don’t Tell

This activity from the Persuasive Writing Manual will help students understand and empathise with different audiences.

Persuasive writing game to boost engagement

Convincing the Community is a persuasive writing game designed to boost engagement by adding an element of healthy competition!

Students are divided into teams and tasked with setting up a new community. Each team represents a particular group (e.g. medical professionals, tradies, farmers) and must persuade the other teams that they add value to the community.

Rebecca Welsh from Tighes Hill Public School loves the Convincing the Community activity and has created some awesome group cards to use with your students. Seven Steps members can click on the button below to download them.

Here, Rebecca describes how she ran the activity:

“In small teams, we randomly selected a societal group and brainstormed reasons why we brought value to the community in general.

We plotted our best ideas on the story graph, wrote Sizzling Starts and Endings with Impact, and drafted a persuasive presentation. Then it was time to polish, rehearse and present to the class.

Amazing fun and such a great way to practise our persuasive writing!”