Writing Activities For Kids

While writing can be a challenging skill to learn, it’s one of the main means of communication, and a basic academic requirement.

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 that will help them develop these skills effectively.

At Night Zookeeper, we’re big believers in making learning fun, and love to come up with new ideas on how you can help your child improve their reading and writing skills!

Without further ado, here are some awesome writing activities that will certainly transform your child’s attitude toward writing:

For preschoolers

Developing pre-writing skills can be an amazing way to inspire your child to want to write, even before they learn how to. Showing your child that writing can be fun and entertaining in the preschool stage will nurture their enthusiasm toward developing more complex skills in later academic years. These are our top suggestions of fun writing activities you can do with your preschool child:

1. Introduce new words and ask your child to draw them

Before they embark on their writing journey, your child must understand the meaning of words, especially as they expand their vocabulary. Drawing can be an easy way to help your child visualize and internalize different interpretations of certain words.

You can start with easy tasks, such as asking them to draw physical things, such as a house, a tree, or the sun. As your child builds an understanding of the link between what they’ve drawn and the corresponding word to describe what’s on the paper, you can start introducing more challenging words. These can be verbs or adjectives, such as running, or drawing what it’s like to be “kind” or “nasty”

2. Coloring

Coloring is perhaps one of the most popular educational activities for preschoolers, but it’s a great way to encourage your child to start working on their fine motor skills, which are crucial for handwriting. With so much to choose from, you can get your child a coloring book full of their favorite cartoon characters, or if you’re an artist yourself, you can even put together your own illustrations for your child to color in!

3. Trace the letters of the alphabet

Just before your child moves on to elementary school, it’s always a good idea to get a head start on skills they will need as young writers. Tracing the letters of the alphabet (even if their meaning isn’t yet clear to your child), is another fun writing activity to develop fine motor skills, as well as muscle memory, which will come in handy when they start learning how to write!

For elementary school level

As your child starts quickly learning new writing skills at elementary school level, it’s important to check in on them regularly and take note of any topics they may be struggling with, as obstacles in their learning journey can sometimes result in a resistance toward writing.

Here are some great writing activities to try with your child:

1. Story cards

This is a wonderful creative writing idea that prompts your child to write using story starters, different settings, characters, plots, and everything in between!

You can make this 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.

2. Fill in the gaps!

For this activity, all your child 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 writing and literacy skills, including when to use nouns, verbs, adjectives, and punctuation to make a story flow.

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 a fun-filled writing activity! 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.

5. Unscramble the sentences

In order for your child to produce high quality writing pieces, it’s important that they understand the rules of sentence structure. This activity is the perfect way to become familiar with these rules, in order to write coherent sentences in an organized way.

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! Nightzookeeper.com’s Waterfall World Jumble is a favorite among our students!

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 (which can be a great opportunity to work on cursive writing skills), they’ll be instantly motivated to express themselves clearly and communicate using correct English language practices.

This can be a particularly effective 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!

Nightzookeeper.com makes writing fantastically fun for your child by turning writing into a game! Whether you’re homeschooling or using our program as a learning supplement, our writing program for kids will help your child improve skills such as spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

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We hope you’ve found these suggestions for fun writing activities helpful! Please visit the following pages for free printable resources, worksheets, and other educational content:

• Reading & Writing Resources
• Reading & Writing Standards

If you have any questions about our reading and writing program, you can reach out to us via email at [email protected], or through our social media pages:

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