creative writing activities ks2

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Tes primary English resources has an unrivalled range of teaching ideas for creative writing activities. Breathe new life into your lesson plans for KS1 and KS2 with our resources and materials, including: - Creative writing worksheets and activities - Writing activities - Storytelling projects And that's just the beginning! All Tes primary teaching resources are created by teachers, for teachers and have been successfully tried and tested in KS1 and KS2 classrooms.

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Snail and the Whale Rhyming word sort and match

Instructions unit - 1 week - Y4-6.

English Interview Lesson - Outstanding Shared Writing Lesson Greek Myths - Years 5 and 6

Skill Sharpeners. Spell and Write. Grade 1

Oracy - Way Home Guided Tour

"Epic Taco Tuesday: Tantalizing Facts for October 4th Fiesta"

Literacy Ideas Talk For Writing Wolves Emily Gavett

HISTORY NELSON MANDELA Describe the Character Booklet Description Creative Writing Workheet S AFRICA

Bubble Writing - Handwriting Practise for Preschool and KS1

Creative Writing - famous first lines!

Esio Trot Reading Comprehension (5 pages)

A Magical Adventure: The Mysterious Door - Unleash Your Imagination.

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• Creative Writing Ks2 Using The Dramatic Imagination

Creative writing KS2 – using the dramatic imagination

Harness the artists' 'secret code' to help pupils develop a gripping narrative…

How can we support students to write creatively? It is a great teaching conundrum.

We have all been there: spending hours setting up a stimulating scenario – a story-starter, an intriguing image, a dramatic moment – in the hope of grabbing the children’s imagination and inspiring them to write a gripping narrative.

Only to sit down later and read something truly depressing like, I walked to the door, I was scared. Then I opened the door and a monster attacked me. I died. Aagh!

It is easy to get frustrated (I know I have) but there is a solution: it is called the dramatic imagination.

The dramatic imagination is the secret code of artists. It is used in literature, film, theatre, art, and music. It is the vocabulary of mood and atmosphere, the language of setting and environment, the magic key to ‘show, not tell’. And we can teach it to children.

What is the dramatic imagination?

There are six dimensions to the dramatic imagination: sound/silence; movement/stillness; darkness/light. You might like to try them yourself.

Imagine standing in a room in an old house. It is night-time, on one side of the room is a paned window, on the other, a single door. Now describe where the light comes from and where it falls in the room. Is it from the moon outside, casting a silver light on the floor? Or a flicking candle on a table near the door?

Describe what sounds you can hear: the wind outside; the creak of the floorboards; the sound of your heart beating? Now take a step towards the door, describe your movement.

Describe the stillness in the room; the darkness; the silence. Now reach out to take hold of the door handle, describe the response from your body, the blood rushing through your veins, the slow movement of your arm, the stiffness of your hand…

How much did you write? If you are like me (and the students who learn how to do this) it will have been a lot. The story hasn’t progressed far, but there is a sense of atmosphere, of building suspense , of fear.

You can imagine it as a film: the music slowly building, the screech of violins, the close-up of the actor’s hand. This is the power of imagination.

We can start using the dramatic imagination as soon as children come to school. In fact, it is one of the great features of the six dimensions that we already use them as a natural part of our teaching whenever we read a book to a class or share a picture.

They are all around us, all the time, the trick is to point them out, and later to teach them explicitly.

How to use it in the classroom

I first did this successfully with a Year 2 class using Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man. I started by writing the six dimensions on a large sheet of paper and asking the students to point them out as we read through the story (projecting the text onto the whiteboard):

The wind sang [sound] through his iron fingers [movement]. His great iron head, shaped like a dustbin but as big as a bedroom, slowly turned to the right [movement] , slowly turned to the left [movement]. His iron ears turned, this way, that way [movement]. He was hearing the sea [sound]. His eyes, like headlamps [light], glowed white, then red, then infrared [light] , searching the sea. Never before had the Iron Man seen the sea.

I then supported the students to use the dimensions in their own writing, first while doing guided writing, and then in independent writing. Giving them feedback such as: “You’ve got a sense of movement and sound here, but where is the stillness and silence?”, it was surprising how quickly the children picked them up and how effectively using them improved their writing.

Later, when I taught Year 6 the effect was quicker still and even more effective.

The dimensions are, in my experience, something children understand intuitively and begin to apply almost as soon as they become competent writers.

They often find joy in using a ‘secret code’ used by expert writers, artists, and filmmakers, and the six dimensions can transform children’s writing, giving them a strategy to move beyond ‘then/and’ stories, as well as providing a vocabulary for teachers to provide practical feedback which the children can use to develop their story-telling skills.

It is exciting to use too, and you’ll have fun incorporating it into your own teaching – teaching as storytelling:

The old house stood alone at the top of the hill, no one had been inside for years. Nothing moved except for the dark figures of animals scurrying across its rotten floorboards, nothing lived in the rooms but shadows filling every corner and every space. The wind and the sun and the rain had not been kind to the house’s paintwork which had once been bright and beautiful, but now lay still on the ground like a pale snow. “Why,” I asked myself, “had I promised to spend a night here, alone?”

Tim Taylor is a freelance teacher, and author of A Beginner’s Guide to Mantle of the Expert . Follow Tim on Twitter @imagineinquiry . Read more about building suspense in writing in KS2 .

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Creative Writing Worksheets K-2

• The Parts of a Letter
• Write Your Own Mad Libs ®
• Fill-in Story: The Halloween Party
• Fill-in Halloween Story: A Scary Night
• Fill-in Story: Halloween Carnival
• My Friend Writing Printable
• Life in the Sea
• Favorite Foods
• How to Write a Haiku
• Getting to Know Me
• Teacher's Guide to Cam Jansen Mysteries
• Make Your Own Holiday
• A Note About Witches: Fill-in-the-Blanks
• Writing a Persuasive Letter (Gr. 2)
• Writing a Letter to Persuade (Gr. 1)
• How to Guyku (Poem Template)
• The Main Idea
• A Visit to Outer Space Writing Activity
• An April Fools' Joke-Off
• Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp Activity Kit
• My New Year's Resolutions (K-2)
• Plan a Holiday
• Curious George: An Acrostic Poem
• Take a Train Ride
• Science and Language Arts: Moon Story
• My Curious George Story
• The Sky's the Limit
• If I Had a Gorilla, Then...
• Happy and Sad Frogs
• More Creative Writing Printables, K-2

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Russia is the largest nation in the world, with land in both Europe and Asia. The capital of Russia is Moscow and the national language is Russian.

One of the world's richest and most powerful countries , Russia has undergone huge change in the last century.

Russian landscapes vary hugely, ranging from polar conditions, mountains and forests in the north to enormous grasslands called steppes and warm beaches in the south of the country. Russia is known for being a very cold country and has a high snowfall.

Top 10 facts

1. Russia is the largest country in the world. Over 142 million people live in Russia.

2. Russia borders 14 different countries on two continents and has the longest coastline in the world.

3. Most Russian people live in cities. The largest, the capital Moscow, has 12 million inhabitants. St Petersburg is the second-largest city.

4. Russia has lots of natural resources ; it sells more gas than any other country and is the second-largest exporter of oil.

5. Russia is home to the longest river in Europe, the Volga (3690km long), and the deepest lake in the world, Lake Baikal (over 1km deep in places) .

6. Russian is the official language, spoken by the majority of Russians. Russian is a Slavic language and uses an alphabet called Cyrillic. The main religion is Orthodox Christianity.

7. The currency of Russia is the Russian ruble.

8. Brown bears live in forests across Russia and are considered the country's national animal. 

9. Chess, ballet and gymnastics are very popular hobbies in Russia and lots of children take classes in them from a very young age.

10. The Russian space program was very successful. In 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first person to travel into space. The first woman in space was also Russian, Valentina Tereshkova.

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Did you know?

Russia is so large that it has 11 different time zones , more than any other country in the world!

The Winter Palace in St Petersburg used to be the home of the Russian royal family (it is now a museum). There are 1500 rooms and 117 staircases in the palace! There are so many works of art on display that it's been estimated that it would take 11 years to see them all!

People who have seven or more children in Russia are awarded an Order of Parental Glory.

At Christmas Russian children receive gifts not from Father Christmas but from Grandfather Frost and the Snow Maiden.

Only a third of Russian people own a car and most people travel by train.

It takes six days to travel the length of the Trans-Siberian railway (9288km)!

Russia has the largest number of forests in the world and is also home to over 40 national parks and 100 wildlife reserves .

White Nights is the name of the summer evenings in St Petersburg; from mid June to July it is light all day and all night in the city.

Russian people love to grow some of their own food: two thirds of people who live in cities have an allotment.

The Metro (Underground) in Moscow is filled with paintings, chandeliers and statues and was built to be a 'palace for the people'. It is the busiest underground railway system in Europe, carrying 2.4 billion passengers every year.

Yakutsk in the north of Russia is the coldest city on Earth, with average winter temperatures of -40°C. The city is built on stilts because the ground it sits on is frozen all year round and can be very unstable.

Look through the gallery and see if you can spot the following:

• Moscow at night
• The Russian flag
• The Ural mountains
• A dacha , a traditional Russian country house
• The Russian winter landscape
• Traditional decorated bread
• A Russian Orthodox church
• Red Square in Moscow
• Matruschka stacking dolls
• St Petersburg
• Singers wearing traditional costumes
• Blini, Russian pancakes served with sour cream and caviar
• The Winter Palace in St Petersburg, the official residence of the Russian monarchs from 1732 to 1917
• Peterhof Palace
• Pelmeni dumplings
• The Russian currency is the ruble
• Moscow's GUM, the largest department store in Russia

Russia is the largest country in the world and in its entirety occupies about one-ninth of the total land on earth. Russia spans two continents, Europe and Asia.

Russia shares land borders with 14 other countries. Some of them used to belong to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a communist state from 1922 to 1991. The USSR was also known as the Soviet Union.

From the 1400s Russia was ruled by emperors called tsars , but in 1917 the Russian Revolution abolished the monarchy and in 1922 the world's first communist state, the USSR, was established . The communist government aimed to create a fair way of life for everyone, not just the rich ruling class. By 1929, however, a general called Joseph Stalin had seized power and imposed lots of new rules on the people, causing huge suffering. In World War II the Russians fought against Nazi Germany and millions of Russians were killed in the fighting.

In 1945 the USSR became one of the world's superpowers. In the following decades the USSR and the United States of America were on opposite sides in many conflicts; this is known as the Cold War.

In 1989 the communist regime fell; two years later the USSR split into 15 independent countries (the Russian Federation).

Under communism religion was banned, but the Church is now very popular, and around 75 per cent of Russians are Orthodox Christians . Around 10-15 per cent of the population are Muslim.

The Kremlin in Moscow is Russia's centre of government and the home of the Russian president. Vladimir Putin has been president of Russia since 2012; he was also president from 1999 to 2008 and was the country’s prime minister from 2008 to 2012.

The country's second-largest city, St Petersburg, was renamed Leningrad in 1924 to honour the Russian Revolution leader, Lenin. The city's name was changed back to St Petersburg in 1991.

Russia has a growing economy. The country is a manufacturer of machines, transport equipment and chemicals, and also has huge resources of oil, gas and minerals like coal, metals and diamonds. Oil, gas and minerals make up 80 per cent of what Russia exports to other countries. Fishing and farming are important industries, and Russia also produces lots of wood products like paper.

The massive region of Siberia, known as the Asian part of Russia, occupies three quarters of Russian land but only a quarter of the Russian population live there. It is very, very cold with average winter temperatures of -25°C. Siberian tigers, who live in the forests of Siberia, are one of the world's most endangered species. It's estimated that there are only 500 Siberian tigers left in the world.

Summers can be very hot in Russian cities, and lots of people have a small house in the country (called a dacha ) where they go at weekends and grow fruit and vegetables. Picking mushrooms and berries are old Russian traditions.

Lots of traditional Russian foods are made from ingredients that grow well in the cold Russian climate, like beetroot, cabbage and potato. Pirogi is a type of pastry with sweet fillings like fruit and honey and savoury fillings like mushrooms, rice and salmon. Soup, rye bread and porridge are often on the menu.

Russians love tea, but they don't use a kettle to make it! Instead they have a very large metal hot water boiler called a samovar . Russians traditionally add sugar, lemon or jam to their tea!

New Year is Russia's biggest festival, celebrated with a special dinner and fireworks. Before Lent (the 40 days before Easter), Russians celebrate Maslenitsa (Pancake Week). During the festival they eat thin pancakes ( blini ) with sour cream, jam or caviar (fish eggs) and make large straw dolls which are burnt on a bonfire.

Russian nesting dolls,  Matryoshka , are famous around the world. They are wooden figures that open and contain smaller and smaller dolls inside, painted as if they are wearing traditional Russian dress.

Russia has been a world leader in sport, space exploration and culture, renowned for its music, arts and literature. Some of the most famous composers in the world are Russian, including Tchaikovsky, the composer of The Nutcracker. Famous writers include Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace , and playwright Anton Chekhov. Ballet is a hugely popular art form and the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow and the Mariinsky Ballet in St Petersburg are two of the best ballet companies in the world.

Russian athletes and sportspeople are incredibly successful, especially at the Olympic Games. One of the most popular sports in Russia is ice hockey; there are lots of ski resorts, too, and some people swim in ice-cold waters, making a hole in the ice to jump in! Football is the most popular spectator sport.

Story-telling is a big part of Russian cultural tradition. One of the most famous traditional characters is Baba Yaga, a wise but scary witch who lives in a house with chicken legs.

Related Videos

Just for fun...

Read some Russian folk tales , including the stories of Baba Yaga and the story of the Crimson Flower   Have a go at some Russian-themed craft activities , including decorating a Faberge-style egg and making Matryoshka Dolls out of different materials

Make paper Matryoshka Dolls

A step-by-step guide to making a Russian clay bird, a  dymkovskaya toy

Download some Russian colouring pages

Make your own Kandinksy art

Try making piroshki ,  small Russian dumplings filled with finely chopped meat or vegetables

Learn to say some basic Russian phrases

Read about some of the traditional games children play in Russia

Listen to songs and rhymes in Russian

See pictures of traditional clothing for Russian children

Make your own paper model of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow

Best books about Russia for children

Find out more

Facts about Russia from National Geographic Kids

The Kiddle encyclopedia guide to Russia

Find out about the native peoples of the Russian North

Read  CBBC's Newsround guide to the Russian Revolution

The Trans-Siberian Express is the longest train journey in the world, stretching from Moscow to Vladivostok across 6 time zones and landscapes ranging from forest to mountain to desert to steppe

Find out more about the Space Race and Russian achievements in space exploration

A guide to Russian food and drink

Steam baths, or banya , are a traditional place to visit in Russia

See behind the scenes in Saint Petersburg's world-famous Mariinsky Ballet Theatre

See pictures of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula , one of the most volcanologically active regions on Earth

Information about festivals and holidays in Russia

See for yourself

See pictures and guides to Russian attractions in the Lonely Planet guide to the country

Facts and advice about visiting Russia

A guide to Baikal Lake , the deepest lake in the world

Read about Moscow's most famous tourist attractions

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• FREE resources & activities
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2021 ACL 500 Word Story Competition

• Creative & Cultural
• 2021 ACL 500 Word Story…

We are pleased to announce the launch of the 2021 ACL 500 Word Story Competition. This year the theme is ‘ Awakening ‘. 

We’re looking for our community to pen a story that quickly grabs our attention and tells a great tale. You can submit an entry as an individual or as a team effort – we want to read them all! Our judging panel will include a range of our experienced tutors, staff and local Essex Author Sarah Armstrong .

Sarah Armstrong is the author of three novels, most recently The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, the first in the Moscow Wolves series. The second, The Starlings of Bucharest, will be out in April. She is also the author of a memoir about being on a jury during the pandemic, A Summer of Spying, which is out in February. Sarah teaches undergraduate and postgraduate creative writing with the Open University, and lives in Colchester with her husband and four children.

How to submit your story:

Entries will need to be in a Microsoft Word format to be accepted. Use the submission form below to submit your details and story. Deadline for submissions is 12 th April 2021.

Prizes include book voucher, a short creative writing course, and your work published. Please ensure your story is suitable for all to read. Thank you and get writing…

Discovering new and exciting skills whilst exploring your creative writing and sharing inspirational moments with others. We have a fantastic range of courses including:

View the full list of Creative Writing courses

Submission form:

Author:  acl admin, related posts.

Clacton Town Centre & Harwich Library 22/04/2024

Earth Day 2024 at ACL Colchester 11/04/2024

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