Kids Creative Writing Prompts
Activities, Ideas And Tips
I will share the best kids creative writing prompts, ideas and activities we have found as one of the very few second generation homeschooling families.
I've got lots of kids writing prompts and ideas to suggest that have
worked to encourage homeschool writing.
You can adapt the activities to
different ages by altering the length and difficulty of each exercise.
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.
- Try this fun story writing game. Roll the cubes and let the pictures act as creative writing prompts.
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"Have had a lovely day watching the girls make up stories using their new story cubes. My
two aren't fans of writing so these made it loads more fun and less
task like. I do love it when the girls are learning without them
realizing." ~ Samie
- 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.
"It
was so fun...We
wrote a family newsletter for English for years. Eldest was editor in
chief and the other 2 were the journalists. They wrote about what they
did in homeschooling, about family events, they wrote poems, drew art
and more.
The newsletter helped them all take ownership of writing, grammar,
and creativity. It made teaching English easy and fun and very much let
them be in control of their own choices for writing."
~ Allie, Courageous Homeschooling Facebook group
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
"One
of my favorite things is creative writing. I love to give the kids some
sort of prompt, and see what they come up with. Another fun thing is to
have them write a short story, and then rewrite it using the thesaurus."
~ Jennifer, Courageous Homeschooling Facebook group
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?
Creative writing prompts are all about inspiring your kids to want to write; everything else follows on from that.
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"Just had a look through your monthly
newsletter focusing on math. Thanks so much for all the links and
ideas. It's brilliant!" ~ Diana
"Hi....I
totally love all your posts and enjoy reading them....the kids
love the activities and enjoy them through and through." ~ Bianka