For some children writing comes naturally. Genius is one of them. She will think of an idea and run with it. Other children require prompts, or ideas fed to them before they can come up with an idea to base a story off of.

The WriteShop StoryBuilders provide exactly that. Every story needs some structure, and with just a few pieces of key information, a story can be built. The WriteShop currently has 4 StoryBuilder E-Books (with another one in the works). We received Animals and Sports ones to review. Each e-book contains 192 cards (in both color and black & white, 48 blank cards, and ideas and instructions.

The cards are divided up in sections, alphabetically according to the type of words they represent. I divided the cards up into three sections and then numbered them all. I had Genius give me three different numbers and those were the cards she got to build her story. For example from the Sports cards she chose the numbers on the cards of archer, graceful and rushing river.

In turn she wrote a great story using those three words as the base. She did the same with the three words she picked from the Animal cards.

What I really like about this product is the immensity of choices it offers. The cards could be shuffled and chosen. They could be mixed together from different products. All the students could be given the same words, and see the unique stories that come of them. You could use them while traveling. You could extend a story by adding to it, with three different cards each day for a week or longer. You could use more than three cards...well you get the idea, the uses are really vast and I'm sure you could come up with even more.

If you have a child who struggles for story ideas, this could be just what they need to provide the spark of creativity. For the cost of $7.95, this is a very affordable piece of curriculum to add to your resources, especially considering it can be used for all grade levels, and it's re-usable.

WriteShop provides more than just StoryBuilders they have all kinds of writing products for use in your homeschool and a support section as well.