Show, Don’t Tell: The Ultimate Writing Toolkit | Narrative Writing Activities

Help your students move beyond sentences like “She was nervous” or “He was excited” and start creating writing that allows the reader to see, feel and experience the moment!

This Show, Don’t Tell Writing Bundle is designed for upper primary students and breaks this important narrative writing skill into three clear, progressive parts. Students begin by learning how writers reveal emotions through clues, then practise applying different techniques before putting everything together in their own extended writing.

Throughout the resource, students explore 5 Ways to Show:

👀 Facial Expressions

🧍 Body Language

🏃 Actions

💬 Dialogue

❤️ Inner Reactions

✏️ What's Included?

PART 1 — Learn It & Spot It

Students are introduced to Show, Don’t Tell and learn how to recognise the clues writers use to reveal a character’s emotions. Activities encourage students to become “emotion detectives” and infer feelings rather than relying on emotion words.

PART 2 — Practise It

Students develop their skills through engaging, scaffolded activities including sentence glow-ups, body language vocabulary, dialogue challenges, picture prompts and different writing situations. Students experiment with combining techniques to create stronger, more engaging descriptions.

PART 3 — Apply It & Write

Students put everything they have learned into practice with more independent writing tasks. With less scaffolding and more room to write, students create complete moments and narrative scenes where their character’s emotions are revealed naturally through their writing.

Why Teachers Will Love It

This resource progresses from explicit teaching → guided practice → independent application, making it easy to use across several writing lessons or as part of a narrative writing unit.

Rather than simply giving students lists of descriptive words, the activities encourage them to think like authors: What would the character do? What would their body reveal? What might they say? What is happening inside them?

Perfect for:

• Years 4-6 / Upper Primary
• Narrative and creative writing units
• Explicit writing lessons
• Literacy rotations and writing centres
• Independent writing practice
• Early finishers
• Revision and consolidation
• Casual/substitute teacher lessons

Give your students the tools to stop telling their readers what a character feels — and start showing them!