With summer just around the corner, students of all ages are looking forward to getting some well-deserved rest and relaxation. The summer holiday is a long one, though, and dedicated parents may be looking for ways to drag their kids away from Minecraft occasionally to pursue more productive digital activities.

Thankfully, Yew Chung International School of Beijing educators are here to help. Inspired by a recent Language Literacy unit that challenges students to create their own comics and short fictional stories, our Year 2 educators offered three different online resources to spark your child’s interest in a variety of creative writing forms.

StoryboardThat: An online resource that some of our Year 2 classes used recently, StoryboardThat is a very easy-to-use online resource that you can subscribe to easily for cheap. An online comic creation tool, it’s excellent for sparking imagination and ideas for the students as they love playing around with the huge database of different characters and settings.

Literacy Shed: This innovative site has gathered together a wide variety of video clips perfect for Lower Primary viewers. Each clip is accompanied with a wide variety of writing prompts for kids to pursue based on the video. Especially creative parents can create their own prompts for their children to write on!

Scholastic Story Starters: This writing prompt generator is another fantastic way to get your kids thinking about new and creative topics to base news stories around. Appropriate for kids from any primary school level, this site spins a virtual slot machine with different random characters and settings to create hilarious and unexpected stories.

Besides writing their own story, encourage your kids to illustrate them too. Try writing the story with a friend or sibling to generate even more ideas and discussion!

For any parents on the fence on why creative writing might not be as important as cramming math and language vocabulary, Baljit Toor, one of our Year 2 Co-Teachers, explained the activity’s value for students, especially at such a young age.

"Creating our own comics in our Language Literacy unit was a fantastic exercise for our students to improve their creativity, make them enjoy writing more, and to improve their overall narrative writing skills. Comics taught the students how to create an extended narrative, the importance of punctuation, and how to use onomatopoeias to enhance their writing. Illustrating the comics demonstrated to students that pictures can play just as much a part in telling a story as words.

"Besides improving overall literacy, these creative writing units gave students a chance to discuss all kinds of ideas with their peers. Through these different online resources, parents can have similarly invigorating discussions with their kids about what they’re writing, all while giving them a greater love for writing, reading, and generally being creative!"

Read more about the Yew Chung International School of Beijing’s Primary School by visiting the section page!