You Write the Story Cats Picture Worksheet

This You Write the Story Cats picture worksheet turns one clear illustration into a full narrative writing task for 2nd grade students. The page shows a single moment: an orange cat has tipped over a basket of yarn and is batting a red ball across the rug, while a grey and white cat steps forward to meet it. There is no text to read first and nothing to decode, so every student starts from the same place. What a child writes depends only on what they notice in the picture and how they choose to tell it, which is exactly the condition narrative writing is meant to practise.

A picture prompt teaches the part of story writing that a sentence starter cannot. Because the illustration holds two characters, a setting and an action already underway, students have to decide who these cats are, what happened just before this moment, and what happens next. That is character, setting, sequence and closure, arrived at by looking rather than by filling in a frame. The directions ask students to name the cats, which pushes them from describing a picture into telling a story about someone. Print the page, give students a few minutes to study the picture and talk about what they see, then let them write. Eight full width writing lines at a 2nd grade band give a real draft room to breathe, and because every story is different, this You Write the Story Cats picture worksheet works just as well for morning work, a writing center, or a whole class lesson you read aloud together afterward.

What’s Included

• One printable 2nd grade narrative writing page
• A large colour picture prompt of two cats playing with a ball of yarn
• Eight full width writing lines sized for 2nd grade handwriting
• Simple two sentence directions students can read on their own
• Name and date lines at the top of the page

Three Reasons This Helps Kids

• The picture supplies the idea, so students spend their effort on telling the story instead of on thinking one up.
• Naming the two cats moves a student from listing what they see to writing about characters, which is the heart of narrative writing.
• Every story is different, so the same page can be used across a whole class of mixed writers without anyone running out of room or ideas.

Teacher and Parent Ideas

• Before anyone writes, ask the class what happened one minute before this picture and collect three or four different answers.
• Use this 2nd grade narratives worksheet as a partner activity: two students write about the same picture, then read both stories aloud and compare them.
• Ask students to circle one detail in the picture they used in their story and one they left out.
• Keep finished stories in a writing folder and revisit them later in the year to add dialogue between the two cats.

Related Resources

• You Write the Story Kids Picture Worksheet
• You Write the Story Helping Picture Worksheet
• Narrative Writing Worksheet
• Story Elements Song