Turn sound into story: Sound Challenges are here

By Steve El-Sharawy
Sept Oct 1, 2026.

Sound Challenges are live. A train screams into a station. Footsteps cross a dark street. A soundtrack plays from inside a character's head. Your students hear the same thirty seconds, and then thirty imaginations go thirty different directions. That is the whole idea, and it is the most exciting thing we have ever put in a writing session.

What happens in the classroom

You pick a Sound Challenge and press play; that is the whole setup. Students write in teams against the clock: where they think they are, what happens next, or what the person in that scene is feeling. Then, as in every WeWillWrite session, they read the other teams' texts and vote on the writing they think works best. No preparation, and it all fits inside a normal lesson.

The whole class listens and writes with Sound Challenges.

Why sound, not a picture

A picture settles the scene for everyone, something a sound doesn’t do in the same way. This difference is well studied, in experiments comparing audio only stories with televised ones, children who only heard the story produced more novel, more imaginative text continuing the story (Greenfield and Beagles-Roos; Valkenburg and Beentjes, 1997).

Sound pulls description away from the visual. Writing what a place sounds like can help students dig up sensory vocabulary and search for words in a more creative way.

Sound Challenges are available now with WeWillWrite Premium. Pick one below, press play, and see what your students hear.