25 Common Core-aligned Prompts for Narrative and Descriptive Writing

The following 25 prompts worked wonderfully in my 6th and 7th grade language arts classes, but I believe they are applicable to the upper elementary classroom as well.

The Common Core writing standards require students to:

“Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.”

Thus, all of these prompts will help fulfill these objectives.

For instance, there is a prompt in this packet that requires students to think about a typical Saturday and recount sequential events descriptively.

Another prompt will require students to describe a perfect lunch, which will require them to think critically and logically in a creative passage.

There are several possibilities here, but the real bonus is the full-color image that accompanies each question to inspire deeper thinking and colorful language choices.

I have alternated prompts in this packet to allow for daily or weekly instruction possibilities. Thus, each narrative prompt is followed by a descriptive writing prompt.

Why? In my classroom, I passed this assignment out as a classroom packet and one that we would use throughout the school year so students could track progress and see how they had developed as writers from Day 1 to Day 180.

Please let me know how you use these prompts in your classroom.

Thank you!


25 Prompts for Narrative and Descriptive Writing by Christopher Mitchell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.