Like cultivating a new habit or learning a new skill, your child needs to practice, practice, practice when it comes to creative writing! After all, practice makes perfect, right?
Here are some simple ways to integrate writing into your child’s day seamlessly, and without the tears!
1.Writing a Letter
The letter may be addressed to an imaginary penpal or a family member – or even Santa Claus – the main idea is to introduce your child to different styles of communicating.
2. Writing a Recipe
If you’ve got a chef, foodie, or baker in the house then they’ll surely love this one! Writing recipes will also require that they pay attention to the details and chronology of creating the finished product, so there’s no doubt they’ll be honing their storytelling skills. With this exercise, they will make a habit of working through a story and researching to make sure they’ve got all the facts right.
3. Drawing a Picture
While this practice is not word-focused, it is still creativity focused, which is the aim. Most children are used to drawing pictures for fun, but it is also great for them to build their story upon. So the next time your child is lost for ideas, why not get them to draw a picture as the starting point?
4. Daily Routines
How does your child spend their days? Do they have a morning and a bedtime routine? These simple practices can help them to learn how to order details in chronological order and can also help your child with their ability to comprehend details.
5. Encourage them to source ideas from the world around them
Inspiration for writing can be found all around us. If your child struggles to get ideas for their writing, encourage them to use their surroundings and the environment around them.
This is something that is taught in our Free Creative Writing Course – ideas generation is often a pain point for many children!
6. Writing Prompts
In addition to the point above, using writing prompts can be a good way to get some writing practice – you can use some of our writing prompts books and downloadable to get the ball rolling!
7. Acrostic Associations
An acrostic association is when the initial letter of a word is used to make a phrase. They are used to help children (and adults) remember information.
If your child is a reluctant writer, you can help to encourage your child to remember key parts of writing like checking their spelling, punctuation, grammar etc with an acrostic association.
To do this, they should select an object, animal, or word in which they will use to create an acrostic poem out of. For example, the word CATS (cute. adorable. timid. sneaky). The idea of this task is to help your child to remember what to include in their writing.
Don’t keep this info to yourself, go ahead and share it with a friend or another parent who you know will benefit from these tools and practices.