Creative Writing Activities for Kids

Writing activities can be used as part of your school or homeschool curriculum to improve and strengthen your child’s writing skills.

Creative Writing Activities for Kids

Writing activities work well as warm-up exercises in a classroom or homechool or as quick activities to fill extra time or to make extra practice fun. Encourage children to put their own stamp on these activities, making them more effective and personalized. All of these activities can be easily adapted to the age and ability of all children.

Journal Writing Activities for Kids

Journal time encourages free writing and the development of thoughts. These exercises offer an effective warm-up activity that gets kids into the writing frame of mind. Assigning a topic for each journal entry provides direction for the creative writing activity. Participants should write the entire time, even if they veer off-topic, to continue the flow of thought and creativity. The journal may also offer a source of inspiration for future writing projects. This practice of journal writing is really beneficial for kids.

Story Starters

Story starters or writing prompts provide students with a direction for the writing activity. A list of story titles or opening lines, both funny and challenging, provides the beginning for interesting stories. Ideas can be written on strips of paper and placed in a pot from which children can easily draw one out of, using it as the opening line for a story. The story starter idea also works well for a writing center or quiet activity for students who complete classwork before their classmates. A fun activity for children who like to get creative is to create their own story boxes which they can use or give to their friends to use.

New Point of View

Traditional fairy tales such as Peter Pan, Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland, serve as a great basis for a creative writing activity. After reading and analyzing the fairy tale, children can choose to write the story in their own words from a different perspective. They could also create a new ending for their favorite fairy tale.

The same goes for Nursery Rhymes. As many nursery rhymes have structures that are good for expository writing, children can read and analyze their favorite rhyme, then write an expository composition following the same structure as the rhyme.

Collaborative Stories

Collaborative stories are fun, allowing all children to contribute to stories on a selected topic. The students begin writing about the given topic for a predetermined amount of time, for example 3 minutes. Then, they pass what they have written to the next person who continues on writing the story for the same predetermined amount of time. The stories continue around the room, requiring the students to read the current story and adding to it. The last round of writing requires the students to create a logical ending to the last story they receive. The stories go back to the original writers, who get the chance to see how the story developed at the hands of the other students. A sharing session allows the class to hear all of the collaborative stories.

Art and Writing

Teaching kids to love reading, writing as well as encouraging them to be creative can help them form a powerful mode of creative self-expression which they will carry with them throughout their lives.

Combine art and writing with these fun Story Book themed Learn to Draw pages. Children who love to draw or want to learn to draw can draw different objects from ten different fairy tales before writing about what they have drawn.

Creative writing activities for kids encourage them to expand their imaginations while improving their writing skills. They work well in both classroom settings or at home. The kids will likely expand these teaching activities naturally to continue improving writing skills, continuing the educational value for everyone involved.