Top 7 Writing Activities For Kids

Writing is a core life skill for children to build, and providing them with fun writing activities is a great way to help them get ahead.

Learning specific writing skills, including grammar, spelling, and punctuation, can be overwhelming for some children, so it’s important to provide your child with fun writing activities to help them develop these skills effectively.

At Night Zookeeper, we believe in making writing practice fun at home, and love to come up with new ideas on how you can help your child improve their writing skills!

But before we jump into those, below are some daily writing practices you can incorporate into your routine, as well as some additional writing activities you can do with younger children.

Daily writing practices

Incorporating writing into daily routines can be incredibly beneficial for children. Here are a few activities to make writing a part of your child's daily life:

1. Journaling: encourage your child to keep a journal where they write about their day, thoughts, or feelings. This helps develop reflection and writing skills.
2. Blogging: if your child has a particular interest, like animals or space, encourage them to write short blog posts about it. This can help them develop their writing voice and style.
3. Free writing: set aside a few minutes each day for your child to write whatever comes to mind without stopping. This helps build fluency and creativity.

Writing activities for younger children

For younger children, writing activities should be fun and engaging, focusing on developing their creativity and fine motor skills. Here are some ideas:

1. Journal jars: create a jar where family members write down fun memories or thoughts on slips of paper. This encourages storytelling and reflection.
2. Family letters: encourage your child to write short letters or cards to family members, even if it’s just a few words. This helps develop communication skills.
3. Family scrapbooks: create a scrapbook where your child can draw or write about special events. This combines creativity with storytelling.

Now, without further ado, here are our top creative writing activities that will transform your child’s attitude towards writing:

1. Story cards

Using story cards is a great creative writing idea that prompts your child to experiment with story starters & endings, different settings, characters, plots, new words, and everything in between!

You can make this fun writing activity as simple or as complex as you’d like, from writing a short sentence in each of the cards, to including images or drawings of what you’d like your child to write about.

This fun activity is great for reluctant writers, as it eases the creative process and helps them through the initial stages of writing a full narrative. It’s also very versatile, and can be effective with preschoolers, as well as with older students!

2. Have fun with mad libs

Mad Libs is a fun activity that prompts children to fill in the gaps in different sentences with the aim to create a unique and funny story. For this fun writing activity, all your young learner will need is a piece of paper, a pen or pencil, and their imagination! Write down a few sentences to form a short story, and leave some gaps for your child to fill in with their own ideas.

Leaving intentional gaps can help your child develop their literacy and writing skills, including when to use nouns, verbs, adjectives, and punctuation to make a story flow. This is also a wonderful creative writing exercise, as the guided storylines will spark new ideas and help to develop students’ imagination.

3. Follow a story map

Who doesn’t love an exciting adventure? You can find lots of different story map worksheets and inspiration online, and they make for fantastically fun writing practice! This is a great way to get your child to explore different story starters and endings, plot lines and twists, while also getting them to use their creative thinking skills as part of their writing practice.

Here’s a free story map to get you started!

4. Try picture writing prompts

Sometimes it’s difficult to think of a story from scratch, so having a visual prompt to help your child think creatively about writing can go a long way! Picture writing prompts can be the inspiration for many different styles of writing, from story writing, to acrostic poems, and can be a wonderful opportunity for your child to expand their vocabulary, improve descriptive writing skills and work on observation and reflection.

Try these picture writing prompts with your child!

5. Unscramble the sentences

Understanding the rules of sentence structure is crucial for writing quality texts, and this fun writing activity is the perfect way for your child to practice!

There are many ways to play this “writing game”, from writing sentences down on a piece of paper, cutting up the paper and scrambling the sentence pieces for your child to reassemble, to playing it online! Night Zookeeper’s Waterfall World Jumble is a favorite among children who use our program!

6. Write to a pen pal

Writing to a pen pal can be a very fun way for your child to work on their physical and cognitive writing skills. Whether they choose to type, or send a handwritten letter, they’ll be instantly motivated to express themselves clearly and communicate using correct English language practices.

This can be a particularly effective writing practice activity if you’re homeschooling your child, as they’ll get the chance to communicate with other children through writing, which is something that is quite common at school. If you’re a little hesitant about finding a pen pal for your child, you can instead suggest that they regularly write to their future self, and become their own pen pal. Not only will this continue to help your child build writing skills, but the different letters will also make for wonderful memories!

7. Try an online writing program

Night Zookeeper makes writing fantastically fun for your child by turning writing into a game! Whether you’re homeschooling or want to ease your child’s learning process, our writing program for kids will help your child improve skills such as spelling, grammar, and punctuation through a wide variety of games, challenges, and interactive lessons.

Sign up today to get a FREE 7-day trial!

More writing activities

Visit the pages below for more fun writing activities for kids, including free printable worksheets, creative writing prompts, and other fantastically fun educational content:

• Elementary Writing Activities
• Elementary Writing Prompts
• Picture Writing Prompts

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