Fruits of the Spirit Writing Prompt Worksheets

The nine fruits of the spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control — are easy for a fifth grader to list and much harder to spot in the middle of an ordinary school day. These fruits of the spirit writing prompts put all nine into situations children actually recognise: a crowded cafeteria, a rained-out field trip, a science fair gone wrong, a lost wallet in an empty hallway. Every page hands students a problem instead of a definition and asks them to write their way to the answer.

This collection holds eighteen worksheets, two for each fruit of the spirit. One page per fruit shows a serious scene and the other shows a genuinely funny one, so students see that character shows up in both kinds of moments. Each page opens with a full-colour illustrated scene carrying no caption at all — the picture tells the whole story — followed by ten full-width ruled lines. Students study the scene, work out what is happening, and write a paragraph explaining the problem and how the kids in it could use that fruit to solve it. These fruit of the spirit writing activities suit independent writing time, partner discussion, morning meeting, small-group character lessons and homeschool copywork alike. Print the whole set as a unit, or pull one page a week and work through all nine fruits over a term.

What’s Included

• 1 print-ready PDF with 18 worksheets, one page each
• 2 pages for every fruit — one serious scene and one funny scene
• Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness and Self-Control
• 18 original full-colour illustrated scenes, no two alike
• Ten full-width ruled writing lines on every page
• Open-ended responses — students write their own paragraph, so answers will vary
• Built for 5th Grade reading and writing levels

Three things make this set worth more than a list of sentence starters. First, inference comes before opinion: a wordless picture makes students gather evidence from faces, posture and setting before writing a word, which is precisely the skill their state reading assessment measures. Second, eighteen pages give the same nine ideas two very different frames each, and the humour in the funny half pulls in the reluctant writers who go quiet during a character lesson. Third, every one of these fruits of the spirit writing prompts asks for a claim the student has to support, so what comes back is a real paragraph you can assess for evidence, organisation and voice rather than a one-line answer.

Teachers and parents can stretch this collection across a whole term. Run one fruit a week: read the scene Monday, act it out Tuesday, write Wednesday, share Thursday. Have students act each scene twice — once without the fruit, once with it — before they write. Cover the lines and use a scene alone as a morning-meeting question. Ask students to rewrite a scene from a second character’s point of view, or to draw the next moment. Post the nine fruits on a wall and let children add a sticky note whenever they catch a classmate living one out. At home, keep one page on the kitchen table and talk it through over dinner before anybody picks up a pencil.

Related Resources

• Writing Complete Sentences about an Image Worksheet
• Citizenship Character Reading Comprehension Worksheet
• Writing Supporting Sentences Worksheet
• Character Songs from Have Fun Teaching