Five Ways to Use Picture Prompts for Middle School

Picture writing prompts are a great way to get your students engaged and excited about writing. Not only do they provide a visual stimulus for students, but they can also be used in a variety of ways to meet the needs of all writers. In this blog post, I will be sharing five picture writing prompts that can be used with middle school students. These prompts will help students write stories, comics, create Instagram stories, and more!

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Picture Writing Prompts For Middle School #1 Comic Books

The first way to get students really engaged in the writing process through pictures is by having them write some comic books. This can be done with a group of students or individually. Picture writing prompts can be used as the basis for an entire story, or just one scene in a longer story that the student is already working on. If you want to give your students some structure, you can provide them with a template that they can use to create their comic book pages. You could also have the pictures already present and your students have to write the dialogue for the comic book. You might even start with just captions and then have your students grow in their abilities and have them write their own comic books from scratch.

This could be a weekly activity as part of daily writing in your class or you could do an entire unit on comic books where you talk about the history and purpose of comics, read comics together, and write your own comics.

Picture Writing Prompts for Middle School #2: A Picture a Day

Another way that you can use picture writing prompts for middle school is to incorporate them into your daily writing practice as a picture a day writing prompts. This could be done with a class Instagram account or just on paper. Students can choose one picture each day and write about it for a set amount of time. This is a great way to get students writing every day and it also allows them to be creative in their responses.

You can give your students some guidelines, such as needing to use only appropriate pictures or what website they are allowed to find pictures on. Alternatively, you can provide the pictures and they can write on them. You might also do a mixture of both where some days the students find the pictures and other days you provide them.

I feel like this would be really good as a month-long unit during the school year to really vary your types of daily writing so that students do not get too bored of the same type of writing prompts over and over. Maybe at the end of the month, students can also pick their favorite writings that they did based on pictures and you can create a bulletin board to display their work.

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Picture Writing Prompts for Middle School #3 Instagram Story Feed

So this picture writing prompts for middle school idea will have your students creating their perfect Instagram feed. You can have them actually do it on Instagram but some students may not have Instagram or be allowed to use it. So you can also have paper printouts for students to draw or cut and paste pictures and write captions. This project should reflect who they are and their interests.

I think that this would be a great way to get to know your students at the beginning of the year and what they are interested in. You can also use it as an ongoing project where every few weeks they have to add a new “post” to their feed. This can be done individually or in groups.

Picture Writing Prompts for Middle School #4 Creative Writing

So this is a little broad in interpretation and there are a lot of ways that you can go about creative writing in your classroom. But one way that you can use pictures as prompts is to have a ” Picture It and Write” where every week or month you choose a different picture and your students have to write a story based on the picture. The stories can be any length, fiction or nonfiction, and they can be in any format such as a letter, diary entry, fiction story, or whatever they can think of.

You can also give students a topic and character name and they have to go find a picture to base their story on. This gives students a little more freedom with their writing and with this project in general.

Another fun way may be to picture pictures into a hat and students come and draw a picture out of the hat and that is now the picture that they write on. This can work for a whole class or in small groups.

Picture Writing Prompts for Middle School #5 Build-a-Writing

This is another fun way to use picture prompts is to use my build-a-writing activities. These will have students building different treats like cupcakes, cake, ice cream sundaes, and more. After they use different elements to build their treats they get to write a story about the treats. They can build on their previous stories and make it so that every treat is an item in a bakery waiting to be bought or just talking about what their lives are like.

This activity is available on Boom Cards, so it is a made-for digital learning activity that is perfect for writing centers or to assign as writing homework. This resource is available for free to my amazing email subscribers so to grab this resource for free click on the image below to sign up for my email list.

So those are five fun and engaging ways that you can use picture writing prompts for middle school in your classroom. I hope that this gave you some ideas on how to get your students to write using pictures as prompts. If you have any other great ideas please share them in the comments below. Also, don’t forget to grab the free build-a writing by becoming a subscriber.