Children use WriteReader to give a visual voice to the wonderful stories in their heads. But what are the most popular ideas behind these stories that inspire such creativity? As the year comes to an end, we decided to look back at 2021 in images to see what themes sparked our young writers’ imaginations the most in bringing their stories to life.
Bank of hand-picked and organized images
WriteReader offers multiple methods of including images in a story. You can use the image bank option to look through the existing catalogue of image categories, which are updated regularly to encompass students’ interest, global topics and events.
Search and you’ll find
However, if your curiosity is not satisfied with the options available in the image bank, you can also search for images using the Pixabay powered search engine – a collection of 1.8 million rights’ free images – using the image search option.
The search bar also features a speech-to-text input option to support emergent and struggling writers, who need help to spell the search words correctly to desire hits.
Top 10 image topics
We combed through the image search data from both options to see what the trending topics for children were in 2021. Here are the results:
- Minecraft
- Spring
- Car(s)
- Dog(s)
- Cat(s)
- Love
- Corona
- Emoji(s)
- Food
- Animal(s)
Five video games in top 50
Not surprisingly, video games were among the most inspiring topics this year. Even though Minecraft reigned supreme at the top of the list (both as the most used image bank category and the most searched word), it was the only video game to make the top ten, with Among Us coming in 32nd and Roblox at 38th rank on the search list. Fortnite and Pokémon were running a little behind, at 39th and 44th ranks respectively.
Makes sense, since life in a post pandemic era returned to almost normal this year, with schools reopening (in most countries) and children no longer having the option of staying at home in front of a screen.
Spring blooms
In a magical move, spring related searches jumped to 2nd place this year, with stories about flowers and fairies running rampant across the screens. The origins for this high ranking may also be traced back to the reason of most schools re-opening during the spring season this year.
These findings were supported by related high searches for Easter, butterflies, and rainbows as well, at 22nd, 76tb and 85th positions respectively.
Cars go really well
In other news, cars still enthral our young creators, by taking the 3rd place. Ready, set, VROOM! In terms of car brands, the Lamborghini is at the top at 147th place on the search list and about twice as far down the list on the 273rd place Tesla show up.
Animals rule
However, not surprisingly at all, animals – and specifically cats and dogs – are still the most written about topics (and not just in idioms), with dogs inching out cats to take the 4th place. Looks like our authors have decided what side of the cats vs. dogs debate they lie on!
On the animal search list we find fish in 18th place and wolves in 21st place. Among the most frequent 100 keywords, there are no less than 20 different animals. So animals are by far the most popular overall topic.
To meet the great interest in writing about animals, in 2021 we launched an image bank category with 20 images of various wild animals. Among our 35 image bank categories, wild animals come in at a nice 10th place.
The new normal of a post-covid world
The data shows that one of the biggest impacts on the students’ writing (and probably children’s lives in general) over the past couple of years has been the Covid-19 pandemic. Even though the ‘corona’ category first in the image bank ranked at 10th place for 2020, it was only in the 93rd place for the “most searched for images”. However, dealing with the fallout of returning to a new normal this year has impacted everyone strongly, with the searches for corona coming in 7th place combined for both the image bank and image search results in 2021.
Love for Emojis & Food
We were not surprised to find that love, in all its glorious forms, came in at the 6th place. Afterall, it is love for creating magical things and leaving our mark on the world that drives us to reach beyond our horizons.
And what better way for our young authors to express themselves in their stories than using emojis to tell the tale! Emojis – ranking at the 8th place – can be used to convey a multitude of emotions, as backed up by the related searches for happy (61th place), scary (68th place), and sad (87th place).
Meanwhile, food doesn’t only fuel our bodies, it apparently also fuels our imaginations as evidenced by food related searches taking the 9th place. And who doesn’t love pizza (taking the 54th place)? We certainly do, as well as all our authors!
Also read our blog post below on how pictures motivate students to write.
