Kids Creative Writing Prompts
Activities, Ideas And Tips

See the best kids creative writing prompts, ideas and activities suggested by 4,000 homeschooling families to inspire your child.

Teaching writing can be a struggle and make you feel like a failure. So I asked 4,000 homeschooling families to come up with the best creative writing prompts and ideas to help you.

And you will also find reassurance that, once you take the pressure off, writing will come in the end.

The Courageous Homeschooling Handbook has lots of tried and tested prompts like:

• Writing games
• Unusual story themes
• Mom and Me letters
• Writing to other people's pets

N.B. The Handbook is not solely about teaching writing. It also covers challenges like dyslexia and autism as well as how to teach reading and math.

Please note that the book links on this page are affiliate links so if you buy I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Kids Writing Tips

My top tips are that writing should stay fun.

Setting topics that your kids haven't chosen themselves is exactly what you don't want - you'll kill any desire to learn.

If things aren't working and writing has become a battle ground, try to be patient.

Every child is different; maybe your kids just need a bit more time before they're ready to start writing.

So one of my best homeschool kids writing tips are to treat the prompts and activities I'm suggesting like a plate of food; see if your kids are tempted by anything on offer.

If not, leave it for another day; I had to wait until my son William was about 9 before he liked the look of anything!

Creative Writing Activities

• You'll see lots of creative writing tips and activities in our page on kids story writing, where I reveal the first topic that really caught fire in our homeschool - TOP TEN DISASTERS! The TOP TENS were a terrific hit; it's one of those ideas you can use as prompts to rate anything your kids are interested in - racing cars, soccer teams, fighter planes.
  

• Write the script to help work out the action in an animation. So far, we've had two: Snuggles Gets Stuck and The Fat Man. Both classics! Tips: Animations are great activities and creative writing prompts because you don't have to write anything very complicated but you can't really work out what's going to happen unless you draw up a rough plan first - that's called sneaking in writing by the back door!

• Exciting kids writing activities can suggest all sorts of inspiring ideas. One of our brilliant prompts is an idea called My Life In A Box. Whatever your kids choose: their top ten likes, songs, their worst summer holiday - you should find the perfect prompts for all sorts of creative writing. Tips: you could pick a famous person's life instead and see what your kids come up with!

Book Box

• Book boxes are a brilliant idea from Ange.  I'll let her explain: "Can I suggest something you might want to try? You may have heard of them already, but I read about 'book boxes' and decided to try it out. So basically you just set a special box aside just for your child that's just for them to make books whenever they want. In it you might include different colored paper along with plain white paper (I included paper with three lines-Sky, fence, ground- to secretly help my son with his penmanship but that's not the point of the book box), stickers, pencils, erasers, glue, scissors, stapler etc...basically stuff to create any kind of book he wants when inspiration strikes. Anyway, my son loves writing his own stories so much and sharing them and I think the freedom he got from the book box was a big part of that. When we were learning about the solar system he went off and created a 'fact' book about a planet he dreamed up with 60 suns and whatnot and a language of its own etc so I found the book box thing really got his creative juices flowing. " ~ Ange x

• Fantasy Maps. Draw a fantasy map and name all the countries and lands.Our homeschool maps started very simple with poo village and goo swamp; but maps turned into marvelous creative writing prompts as the kids really got into them. Once the imagination is fired, you can invent all sorts of interesting places to visit; like Hambon, the land of hamsters or the homeschool forest of happyness (sic) and joy. Tips: To make creative writing prompts more tempting, it's great if you have some ideas which add in some fun activities. You can make your maps look ancient by using scissors to snip the edges and drag a few old teabags across to make them go brown.

• Keep a homeschool scrapbook. My son William started one on homeschool robots, which fitted in with his delight in learning how to build your own dinosaur robots but any ideas your kids are interested in will work fine. My daughter Catherine started a homeschool nature scrapbook as she grew older. Collecting crab claws, feathers and butterfly wings are great activities to bring science to life, as you'll see in our page on homeschooling science.
  

• Older kids might enjoy the one word site, which gives one word writing prompts and a blank paragraph to type in. That could be fun!
• Another site for high school is this one which has a series of photographs with prompts.  Scroll down and hunt for one which appeals.
  

• Write a cartoon. Tips: Very useful for writing prompts and ideas because you only need write short bubbles of words at a time.

• Try Unit Study lapbooks for prompts to encourage creative writing ideas for kids up to High School. Two which might inspire are our homeschool dinosaur lapbook and life in the rainforest.
  

More Creative Writing Ideas

• Another way to encourage creative writing without anyone noticing is to get your kids writing letters to their friends. Pen Pals are great prompts for this; you should be able to find an ad. for someone wanting a pen pal fairly easily. Tips: We discovered a homeschool secret - a great way to encourage the correspondence is to put a simple gift inside - Catherine sent a needle felted toy she'd made as you can see in our homeschool crafts.

• A nice variation which has worked really well in our homeschool is Pet Pals. Writing to Becky the mongrel, Izzy the Cat and Kinky the homeschool rat has been great fun; again, it helps if you can sometimes put a few dog treats in with your letter!

• One of the great creative writing prompts is to write a film script. Top tips: get your child to think about the characters of the people who will be in your play and the plot. You can add lots of English activities into this idea; you could even turn this into a real film with scripts if you have a video camera.

Resources To Help Reluctant Writers

There is a great site here with free downloads to help encourage your child to write.

Thanks to Fauzia for finding this.

Creative Writing Prompts And Tips

Encouraging creative writing is about not making the activities and ideas too difficult.

A few words on a picture is plenty to begin with; so long as your kids feel pleased with what they've done they will, eventually, want to write a bit more!

As we've seen, the most successful creative writing ideas are often sneaky; if your child wants their favorite meal for lunch can they write the ingredients on the shopping list?

Writing Help

"My 6-year-old is passionately reluctant to write and hates it. What would you do?"

~ Emily, The Courageous Homeschooling Handbook

Answering cries from the heart like this is exactly what The Courageous Homeschooling Handbook does. We all know how awful it feels when it seems you can't even teach your child a basic skill; and the trouble with homeschooling is that it is obvious to everyone else if your child can't write.

4,000 homeschoolers come together to help you with ideas and creative writing prompts. They also prove that you will succeed. The Handbook also covers difficulties like dyslexia and anxiety as well as help with reading and math.

Please note that the book links on this page are affiliate links so if you buy I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Creative writing prompts are all about inspiring your kids to want to write; everything else follows on from that.

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Homeschooling › Writing › Prompts

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