Some children enjoy spending hours on end writing paragraphs and stories, but others absolutely dread it. They may have great ideas but struggle to express them on paper. Yet as students move through school, the writing demands will only continue to increase. Help make writing fun for your child with the ideas detailed below.
PLAY GAMES!
Play Scrabble, where players use letters on tiles to form words that build on each other. Hangman is another fun game, where one player thinks of a word and writes a series of blank spaces on a sheet of paper, each representing a letter. You can play story games with your child, where you provide your child with a story that contains blanks for words that they must fill in.
JOURNALING
Encourage your child to maintain a journal and write in it daily or almost daily, and you will likely see a drastic improvement in her writing skills. Do something interesting each day and encourage your child to write about that topic in her journal. Then teach the child to self-check their work with an acronym like COPS, which stands for Capitalization, Organization, Punctuation, and Spelling, and check each element in the acronym, one by one.
CREATE A WRITING JAR
Create a fun “writing jar” filled with story prompts. To do so, look through newspapers and magazines with your child and cut out interesting pictures of animals, celebrities, or beautiful vacation spots. You can also write down phrases on small cards, like “If I were an animal, I’d be…” or “My favorite dessert is…” and put those cards in the jar. Then have your child close his eyes, pick a card from the jar, and use it as a story prompt to create a writing piece.
WRITE LETTERS
Creating handwritten letters can improve writing skills, and it’s exciting for the recipient to receive an actual letter in the mail. Purchase colored pens or pencils, stamps, and stickers for your child, and have her write a letter to a cousin, grandparent, aunt, uncle, friend, or even pen pal, then decorate it with lots of colors, pictures, and stickers. Make it a fun, colorful activity and she will have lots of fun doing it – plus the recipient will be thrilled to receive it!
TRY AN APP
The app Writing Challenge for Kids includes a variety of prompts that kids can choose from to write a creative story. Book Creator is a tool that helps students write their own books using different templates and designs. Edublogs is a great website that helps your child get into blogging!
This article first appeared on NewYorkFamily.com.
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