Sustainable writing tips

If you’re keen to get your little ones involved in story writing, but aren’t sure where to start, then we’ve got a few sustainable writing tips for you.

Top tips

These are our top tips, including tips about how to get started and what to include:

• Read one of our sustainable stories or watch our story time video of Away (available on our website) ~ these are especially written and illustrated to get children talking about our environment and issues around waste and taking care of it.
• Watch our story time video of Away on the website ~ free to access.
• Have a go at one of our storytelling activity packs ~ we have storytelling packs for both Away and Oceans Away and these can be a great starting point to get children thinking about how stories are constructed, the characters, the setting and the plot of the story ~ free to download.
• Chat about what sustainable actions you take at home or at school to support taking care of the environment ~ this could be about recycling, reusables, choosing to shop refills or something else that you do.
• Discuss the story writing campaign ~ talk about why taking sustainable actions is important.
• Brainstorm some ideas for characters, setting, plots, and words that they might like to use
• Have a go at drawing and naming characters that will feature in the story ~ giving characters a visual image is a really great step in bringing stories to life.
• For younger children encourage mark making and model this ~ very young children have incredible imaginations and can create stories even before they can make recognisable letters, drawing and making marks to represent these stories is a really big part of developing a love for writing.
• Verbalising their story or using props to act it out is a great way to play around with ideas ~ it can be a lot of fun and a great way to try out a variety of ideas.
• Encourage them to draw, write, sign, act out, read their story back to you ~ sharing is so important, children love to hear what we think and get us involved in their creativity. Role play can be a really fun way to bring stories to life.
• Don’t focus on hand writing or spelling for this exercise, we want to encourage creativity and ideas without the pressure of these ~ for the focus of this campaign we want to fire up imaginations rather than focus on accuracy in letter formation or spelling.
• For younger children you could make concertina books with them for them to add their marks to ~ this is such a lovely way to create little books, children can then use these for so many reasons.
• Using phrases like ‘tell me about’ will encourage them to share the meanings to their marks even if they are not yet forming recognisable letters ~ encourage them to talk about the marks, pictures and letters they make, children will have formed their own ideas about what these represent and love sharing it with you.
• Most of all, MAKE IT FUN! This isn’t extra homework, so it should be relaxed, fun and inspire them to want to create their own stories ~ fun is key to building a lifelong love of writing and reading.
• There’s no word count, so stories can be any length they like and can be presented in any way that the children choose, this could be pictorial, video, puppet show, written or in another format ~ we don’t want to restrict their creativity, and would like the campaign to be as inclusive as possible, so children can take part no matter what stage they are at with their writing or ability. Imaginations are all that is really needed!

Why write stories?

We are aiming to inspire children to create their own stories, get writing and use their imaginations to focus on sustainability and what it means to them. We’re aiming to support children’s literacy, storytelling, creativity and sustainability.