Fairy Tale Writing Structure | Five Sentence Fairytales | Sentence Starters

Give all of your fairy tales a ‘happily ever after’ with these fairy tale writing prompts, perfect for fairy tale writing. Five sentence fairy tales are a powerful way to teach students how to construct a fairy tale.

Writing five descriptive sentences to outline each stage of the fairy tale, helps your students to successfully complete their stories. No more unfinished stories!

The ‘five sentence fairy tale’ scaffold includes opener/hook, orientation, complication, solution & resolution. There are also fractured fairy tale slides with different ideas for fracturing a fairy tale/

Here’s what is included in this resource:

PowerPoint slideshow with eleven different fairy tale-themed prompts for displaying on your whiteboard:
Traditional fairy tale prompts - focussing on characters, settings etc.
Prompts for fractured fairy tales - different prompts including how students can fracture their tales.
Blank slide to add your own prompts
Use on your whiteboard or for distance learning.
Easy to differentiate!

You will find your lower writers will finally give you complete stories, while your talented writers will fill a page with just five sentences!

When students nail this process, they are ready to use these sentences as topic sentences for narrative paragraphs.

How can you develop this idea?

Once students have nailed writing five sentences, they can extend the sentences to become topic sentences for paragraphs. I like to tell my students they now have to write two sentences, then three etc.

Before you (or they) know it, they have written a complete story!

Finally, all of my students edit for language features, structure, grammar, punctuation and spelling.

This is when they check they have included direct speech, descriptive language, figurative language and more, depending on their age.

I have used Five Sentence Stories (and the planning and brainstorming processes) to ‘bump up’ my students to the next level -there is nothing better than reading complete and detailed stories!