Fun 2 write
12 Writing Games To Help Kids Learn To Write And Have Fun Doing It
Writing can feel daunting to young learners — there are so many letters to memorize, sounds to recall, and words to spell! You might be wondering what the best writing games are to help your child learn to write.
HOMER has got you covered with these simple and engaging writing games! With minimal equipment required, these activities can be set up within minutes and provide unlimited fun.
Before we dive into our favorite writing games, let’s discover why writing is important in child development.
Why Writing Is Crucial To Development
From their early scribbles to drawing recognizable letters, writing is a useful form of self-expression for children and allows their ideas to flow more easily.
What’s more, the alphabetic code is reversible, so children who use sounds to determine words for writing are simultaneously advancing their ability to sound out words and read coherently. Win-win!
This is a lifelong skill that your child will use every day, so it’s important to know how to best nurture and develop these emergent literacy skills from a young age.
By playing the writing games outlined below and taking the time to practice, your young writer will be an expert in no time!
Why Games Are Important For Learning
You know that it’s important for your child to develop writing skills, but you may be wondering why you should incorporate games into their learning.
Why can’t your child just sit down with a pen and paper to practice writing?
Less Stressful Learning
Here’s the stitch: Being asked to sit down and practice writing skills can be daunting for some kids. It can also be frustrating when they come across letters or words they struggle with.
Games, on the other hand, decrease stress levels and get children excited about learning.
While playing learning games, your child will not only be practicing their writing skills, but they’ll also be more focused on completing the fun activity than on getting frustrated that they can’t write the uppercase Q, Z, or J.
When children see that learning doesn’t have to be tense or highly stressful, it can also change their perception of educational activities. In fact, they may be more willing to participate in future educational games.
Motivation
Motivation is one of the biggest advantages of playing writing games.
Kids are more likely to pay attention to the instructions and participate when they see the activity is fun. This is much more effective for teaching writing (and other) skills than simply handing them a worksheet.
Some educational games also allow children to play in pairs or groups. Interacting with peers or family members in this way is an excellent opportunity to develop critical social skills, such as listening to others, communicating effectively, and taking turns.
Friendly Competition
Kids can be very competitive — with their friends, siblings, and sometimes even with mom and dad. Playing writing games can foster a spirit of fun, healthy competition.
If you involve multiple children in these activities, the child who wins can learn to congratulate their fellow competitors and not just brag about their accomplishment. And the one who loses can learn to celebrate another person’s win and try harder next time.
Problem-Solving Skills
By nature, most games require participants to incorporate problem-solving skills, planning, and creativity. That’s a lot of mental work!
Playing writing — and other types of educational — games can help your child develop these essential life skills.
Now that we’re clear on why writing games are important, let’s get into the activities you can introduce to your child today.
We’ve divided these into three sections — writing games for preschoolers and kindergarteners, first graders, and second graders. So, feel free to scroll to the relevant section for your child (or children), and let the games begin!
Writing Games For Preschoolers And Kindergarteners
1) Disappearing Letters
What You’ll Need
- A chalkboard
- Chalk
- A paintbrush
- A cup of water
What To Do
Start this activity by writing a repeated letter, a word, or your child’s name on the chalkboard using your chalk. If you’re writing a single letter, start by writing it five times in a row.
Dip the paintbrush in the cup of water and have your child trace over each of the letters, erasing them one by one.
Once your child has mastered one letter, move on to multiple letters until they’re comfortable using this activity to “write” their name and short consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words such as dog and cat.
This activity is great for working on developing your little one’s fine motor skills as well as their spelling abilities, which will aid them as they take pencil to paper!
2) Hands-On Writing
What You’ll Need
- A tray or bin
- A fun material such as sand, flour, or shaving cream — anything that can hold a shape
- A pen and piece of paper (optional)
What To Do
To start this activity, grab a tray or bin that’s deep enough to hold your chosen material.
Fill your tray and bin with sand, flour, shaving cream, or anything else that can be used to form a shape. This is what your child will use to develop their writing skills!
Say a letter to your child (or write the letter on a piece of paper for them to copy, if needed) and have them write the letter into the sand, flour, or shaving cream with their finger.
Eventually, you can work your way up to having your child write whole words, like their name or things they love (the names of their friends and family or even their favorite foods or toys).
Don’t worry too much about what the letters look like — even scribbles are OK! Whatever your child writes to produce a letter or word is great progress.
This activity lets you make writing a fun, sensory experience! Try using different materials to keep your child engaged and to learn more about the world around them while they practice their writing skills.
You could also use a fingerpainting method for this game for some colorful fun — enjoy getting creative with this writing game!
3) Yarn Letters
What You’ll Need
- Blank sheets of paper
- Pencils
- Yarn
- Child-safe scissors
- Glue
What To Do
Grab the blank sheet of paper and help your child draw a letter of the alphabet with a pencil. Then, hand them the yarn, scissors, and glue, and help them trace the letter by cutting and gluing the string onto its shape.
Performing this task is an effective way for your child to develop their fine motor skills, a key component of writing. In addition, this hands-on activity allows children to continue learning their letters.
Writing Games For First Graders
4) Roll The Dice
What You’ll Need
- A piece of paper
- A pen or pencil
- A dice
What To Do
This writing game is all about creating a fun story with your child using dice to determine how many words you get to add each turn!
Start by having your child choose a main character, a setting, and a problem. For example, your character might be a cat, your setting might be a garden, and the problem might be that the cat needs to find some food.
Write the first sentence of your story based on the character, setting, and problem you’ve chosen with your child. Using our example above, the first sentence might be, “Once, there was a cat in a garden who couldn’t find any food.”
After you write the first sentence, have your child roll the dice. Whatever number the dice lands on is the number of words they’ll add to the story — not one word more or less!
You can assist your child by sounding out tricky words and helping them write if needed. Once they’ve added their words, it’s your turn to roll the dice and write your next round of words based on the dice number.
Take up to five turns each before finishing your story together by choosing an ending. Then read your story aloud to see how it all flows!
5) Speech Bubbles
What You’ll Need
- A piece of paper for drawing or a printed cartoon
- A pen or pencil
What To Do
For this activity, start by having your child draw a picture with a character or two. You could draw this scene together or even print off some characters from the internet to color and decorate together.
Once you’ve finished drawing and decorating your characters, it’s time for each of you to draw and fill in a speech bubble to create thoughts for your character (or a conversation if you drew more than one character).
For example, if your character is a dog, maybe he’s standing by an empty bowl. What might a hungry dog say? Some options could be, “Where’s my food?” or “I hope they bring pizza!”.
Let your child’s imagination run wild with possibilities for filling in the speech bubbles and enjoy this writing activity together by writing down the silly suggestions, too!
Speech bubbles are one of the most fun options for writing games as they’re quick, easy, and short for young writers.
This may help your child feel less intimidated as they explore more words to add to their vocabulary and practice forming their letters correctly.
6) Birthday Cards
What You’ll Need
- Colored pens or crayons
- Pencils
- Blank birthday card
What To Do
Birthdays are a day most people look forward to. For kids, this day usually means lots of gifts, games, a birthday cake, and, of course, a birthday card.
Help your child create a unique birthday card for their friend, neighbor, cousin, sibling, mom, or dad — whoever they want! Once they select the recipient, get the supplies you need and help them write a sweet message for their loved one.
This is a wonderful activity for your child to practice putting their thoughts on paper. They can also add flowers, hearts, and anything else that will help to make the card extra special.
Note: This activity can be used for any occasion, not just birthdays. Is it the holidays? Has the family been invited to a graduation party? Do you have a family member who’s not feeling well?
All of these are excellent opportunities to create a special card for a loved one.
7) Map Out The Story
What You’ll Need
- A blank sheet of paper
- Colored pencils (or crayons)
What To Do
The aim of this writing game is simple: create a setting for a story.
Children love when a storybook they’re reading includes some pictures and a map to bring the story to life. With this activity, they get to create their own!
All your child needs to do is draw a map of the story setting of their choosing, labeling the different areas. This can be a story they’ve read or one that’s just popped into their head. It really doesn’t matter as long as they’re excited about it.
To help them get started, you can ask prompting questions, like:
- Does your story take place on land or in water?
- If it’s on land, what and who lives on that land?
- If it takes place in water, what types of interesting creatures are there?
- What’s the weather like?
- How many characters are there?
- Where do these characters live?
- What do the characters do?
- Are there any landmarks?
Once your child is clear about the world of the story, it’s time to draw and create it. Now you can also help your child write a story that takes place in their invented world.
For this activity, we’re not expecting incredible artwork or penmanship. Instead, the main focus is to have kids practice gripping pens or pencils and writing.
Writing Games For Second Graders
8) Grocery List Writing
What You’ll Need
- A piece of paper for making your list
- A pen or pencil
What To Do
Make the task of writing your grocery list into a game!
You can do this as part of a make-believe or role-playing game with your child, or you can create a real grocery list together before the shopping gets done.
Try planning out some meals for the week ahead, and then make a list with your child for each of the ingredients needed. Explain that writing a list helps us to remember all the things we need to buy, and discuss what items you might need to purchase.
Keep it simple and help your child by sounding out words as they write. Once the list is written, your child can enjoy checking off each item one by one after it’s been put in the cart!
9) Household I-Spy
What You’ll Need
- Two pieces of paper, one for you and one for your child
- Two pens or pencils, one for you and one for your child
- A timer or timer app
What To Do
One of our favorite writing games is this version of I-Spy with a twist!
Grab your paper and write each letter of the alphabet down the left-hand side. Once you and your child have both written the alphabet on your paper, set your timer for 10 minutes.
You’ll then race from room to room to find and write down as many objects as possible that begin with each letter of the alphabet. Write each object next to its corresponding letter and fill in as many as you can within the time limit.
You could also set a handicap for this writing game to raise the stakes! For example, if your child’s time limit is 10 minutes, cut yours in half so that you have to find as many objects as possible in five minutes.
10) Accordion Storytelling
What You’ll Need
- A sheet of paper
- Pen
- Ruler
What To Do
The first player will start the story at the top of your clean sheet of paper by writing two sentences on separate lines. They can write about any topic they want.
When they’re done writing, they’ll need to fold the paper over the first sentence and pass the paper on to the next player. This means that the first sentence won’t be seen. The next writer will only be able to see the second sentence on the page.
This player will need to write their own two sentences based on the line they can see. After that, they’ll fold down the first line of what they wrote and pass it on to the next player, too. The paper will continue to be passed around and folded like an accordion.
The round ends once all the paper has been folded up, and there’s no space left to write. Once you’ve reached this stage, open it up and read the story aloud together.
What interesting story did you come up with? Get ready to have a good laugh!
Note: You can take turns reading one sentence each, or you can nominate one person to read the whole story to everyone.
This is a great game to play with the whole family or even just two people, although it is the most fun with at least three people. And it will encourage creativity and writing skills.
11) Pen Pal Writing
What You’ll Need
- Paper
- Pens or pencils
- A pen pal
What To Do
Writing letters to pen pals is very traditional. In a nutshell, it involves two people in a long-distance friendship who communicate by writing letters to each other.
Now, with the advancement of technology, very few people still do this via snail mail. But it can be a great way to encourage children to write.
Who can your child write to? They can choose a friend who’s moved schools, a cousin who lives in another state, or their grandparents. It can be anyone they’d like to send a message to!
This is a fun way to help children learn about mailing letters and how the postal system works. They also get to create memories and can keep the letters their pen pal writes to reflect on for years to come!
12) Rewrite The Ending
What You’ll Need
- Paper
- Pen or pencils
- Storybook
What To Do
Children will need to exercise their imaginations to play this game.
To get started, read a book aloud to your child. (This can be an old favorite or a new story.) Once you’ve finished reading, encourage them to create their own version of the ending.
It can be challenging for children to imagine their favorite stories in a different way, so you might need to help your child think outside the box:
- What if the frog never turned into a prince but into a big elephant instead?
- What if the three little pigs learned karate and decided to fight the wolf?
- Could the little mermaid have a twin sister she just discovered?
This activity lets your child exercise their imagination while also practicing their writing skills. If this is done with multiple children, it will be fun to see what exciting versions of the script each child comes up with.
Enjoy Learning To Write With HOMER!
We hope you’ve found some new favorite writing games from our activities in this guide!
From creating sensory play activities with sand and fingerpaints to writing a grocery list together, there are so many ways to get creative with your child and make writing a fun shared activity.
For even more writing fun, unbox a learning adventure with our Explore Letters Kit. Watch your child build their literacy skills, using their imagination to lead them through a variety of writing and spelling activities!
Author
6 Fun Writing Activities for Your K-2 Writing Center – Proud to be Primary
Writing may be difficult for some students, but it doesn’t have to be boring. Use exciting writing activities in your kindergarten, first grade, and second grade writing centers to show kids how fun writing truly is.
Create a Classroom Writing Center Filled with Writing Activities Kids Love
As a kid, I dreaded writing. It required too much brain power, and it wasn’t until I was allowed to use my own creative devices that I started to enjoy it more. The kids in your classroom may operate the same way.
Provide students with exciting ways to express themselves through writing, and their love for writing will soar! Take a look at some unique writing activities kids will adore!
Writing may be difficult for some students, but it doesn’t have to be boring. Use exciting writing activities in your writing centers to show kids how fun writing truly is.
Why is a Writing Center Beneficial to Students?
Imagine giving students a sheet of paper and asking them to start writing. They have a lot to wrap their brain around, and they may sit there without picking up their pencils. To get kids to write fluidly, they need scaffolding. This is where writing centers come in.
Writing centers are a great way to introduce students to smaller writing tasks that can later apply to larger writing assignments. These small writing activities help build a love for writing because they are on topics that interest students.
Writing centers come in all shapes and sizes and are easy to customize to meet your needs. If you aren’t sure where to start, here are simple writing center activities to incorporate into your classroom throughout the year.
1. Writing Spinners
When using writing centers in kindergarten, first grade, or second grade, it’s essential to use topics that are relatable to students. Kids love when there’s a monthly or seasonal theme because they are familiar with the changes.
Writing Spinners allow students to choose their topic at random. It gives them an element of surprise and adds some fun to the writing process. Kids spin for a writing prompt or picture to write about.
Place these themed spinners in your writing centers to motivate kids to write about things going on in their current lives or related to a monthly theme. Hang with your writing center vocabulary posters or place them in a container for kids to grab with a paperclip.
2. Writing BINGO
Kids love options when it comes to writing. All of your students won’t have the same interests, so supply them with plenty of different ideas they can choose from.
Writing Bingo is a fantastic way to allow kids to write about multiple topics of their choice related to a theme. Perfect as a differentiated option for older students who enjoy writing more often.
Provide kids with their own Bingo board to color in, and they can choose various topics throughout the month. Remind them to get five in a row when they are choosing their topics!
3. Writing Prompt Cards
Do you have students who need encouragement to find something to write about? Writing prompts are a simple way to give kids ideas quickly.
Laminate Writing Prompt Cards and hang them on a ring or set them in a bin for students to look through. You could also select a few for the day to place in a pocket chart for kids to select from.
Writing prompt cards on various topics gives students ideas to write about throughout the year.
4. Write About It
If you want students to work on writing about a specific topic, provide them with a fun Write About It Prompt. These prompts make it easy for students to write a few sentences about the topic and color a picture to match their words.
This writing activity is excellent for writing journals or writing centers to complete throughout the month. Students start with a picture and use their creativity to write about it. They can add details to the image and make it their own!
5. Writing Tear Off Strips
Another fun way to get kids excited about writing is to post Story Ideas on the board within your writing center. Like an ad for a job, students tear off a strip if they like the idea and begin writing about it.
Story idea tear-off strip sheets include multiple topics to write about that will have kids asking for more. It’s a fun twist that will get kids engaged.
6. Writing Prompt Mats
Writing Mats include a word list and are an excellent resource for beginning writers. Beginning writers in K-2 feel supported when they have a list of words to choose from and a conventions checklist to refer to when writing.
Writing Mats make a great writing center activity. These print-and-go activities require no prep and can be placed in your classroom writing center at any time of year.
Try a sample of Writing Mats in your classroom’s writing center with this FREE resource!
Click the image below to grab a copy.
Use these fun writing activities to engage and motivate students to write all year long. They will be eager to participate in the writing center you set up, and you will love how simple it is to teach and immerse students in writing.
Writing Centers for the Year
Try the Writing Center Bundle by Proud to be Primary. It includes all of the writing activities mentioned above plus a ton more (templates, posters, vocabulary) to get you through the entire school year. Everything you need for themed writing centers in the K-2 classroom.
You Will Also Love These Writing Ideas
classroom writing center
helping kid writers
writing center bundle
PIN for Later
Funny Russian language memos, part 2
Last year, especially for the Day of the Russian Language, we prepared children's memos - poems that beat the most common mistakes in grammar, spelling and orthoepy. Such funny rhymes help the child to easily remember the rules and get around the "pitfalls" in speech - both oral and written. We hope that the material was useful for your children and contributed to their academic success!
We offer you a continuation of last year's article - 15 more poetic memos for various difficult cases. nine0003
1. In the word "beet" the stress falls on the first syllable (written with the letter Ё). In the garden of Baba Fyokla, | |
2. In the word "catalog" the stress always falls on the last syllable, and in the word "cottage cheese" - on the first or last. Don't say catalogue, | |
3. Something, either, then, something - | nine0008 |
4. In all case forms of the word "scarf" the stress falls on A. Like our Martha | |
5. Remember the correct gender forms, pl. names of some vegetables and fruits. Six hectares of oranges, | |
6. Remember the correct forms of gender, pl. Respect a person | nine0019 |
7. Remember the correct forms of the genitive case of the words “boots”, “boots”, “socks”, “stockings” (these rules were also in the last edition of the memo, but not together). In the children's fairy tale Kolobok | |
8. The prefix "milli-" is written with a double LL. In millimeters, -grams, -liters | |
Words in which ZhI and SHI, | |
10. Remember the exception words in which Yu is written after the consonant Ш. In words where there is CHU-SHU, ZHU-SHU, | |
11. Remember the exception words in which the consonant Z is written Y. Gypsy stood up on tiptoe | |
12. There is no letter B in the root of the word “participate” (and cognate words). The word "participate" B does not occur, | |
13. Remember the difference in the spelling of the words “in general” and “in general”. "In general" is written in two words, | |
14. In the phrase “day (of what?) of birth”, the word “birth” is in the genitive case, therefore it has the ending -Я (in no case -E). nine0011 On your birthday | |
15. In the word “more beautiful”, the stress falls on the root, not on the ending. They tell me I'm prettier, |
Happy Russian Language Day!
Dear readers, perhaps you know other good memos? Did you compose them yourself or remember them from childhood? We will be very grateful if you share your knowledge with us and supplement this article with new interesting material. Letters can be sent to our editorial office.
Tsyplakova Svetlana
Especially for https://inteltoys.ru
To the list of articles
Ballpoint pen write-erase Alingar, "Jolly fingers", 0.
pcs|pack of 40|box of 960
- Code: AL4841 Code: 50122
- Brand: Alingar
- Country: China
- Analogues
- nine0010 Available
Registered only
- About item
- Features
- Analogues
Alingar Ballpoint Pen, Jolly Fingers, 0.8mm, blue, round, colored, plastic case, carton
The ballpoint pen is amazing because it has erasable ink. This pen is like a simple pencil - you can write on one side and erase what is written on the other. Great for adults and kids as it makes it easy to fix mistakes.
Handles | |
Type | manual |
Set | yes |
Ink color | blue | nine0019
Pen diameter | 0.![]() |