Writing activities children
10 Fun Writing Activities for Kids
2. Cards & Letters
When you assign homework, your students don’t always see the greater purpose. But, writing cards and letters is real-life writing with a purpose. Whenever there’s a holiday, you can use this method to get them to write and have fun while doing it. Let them design and write cards for Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and all other holidays. This practice will also help your students learn the standard format for writing friendly letters.
3. Fill in the Story
It was a sunny day. The little tiger just woke up… He saw the _____________, and he said _____________. Together, they ____________________________. Then, they ________________________. They had lots of fun. They agreed to ________________________.
You’d be surprised to see how creative your students can get with few simple sentences. If you need inspiration, then you can get some worksheets with blank stories.
4. Drawing Words
How would you draw the Moon? How would you draw the word “precious”? Think of different words. They can signify items, but you should also let them play with abstract concepts, such as love or beauty.
This activity inspires writing because it helps the students understand the true meaning and importance of every word they use.
5. Birthday Messages
Whenever someone has a birthday, get the entire class to write a message. You can get a big piece of paper where everyone will have space to write. You can also turn this into an art project, so the students will have an authentic purpose for writing.
The sentences can start with, “I wish you…” Let everyone express their message and appreciation for the friend.
6. Cut Out My Name
This is a great way to teach cursive writing. Get some paper and fold each piece lengthwise. Each student should write their name in cursive on one half, with the fold being at the bottom. Cut around the upper side of the name.
When you unfold the paper, you’ll get a symmetrical figure. Each name gives a different figure. What does it look like? A bug! Let them draw or paint on the clean side of the paper.
7. Chalkboard Writing
For this activity, you’ll need clipboards, chalkboard paint, a paint brush, tape, and chalks. Tape the clipboards on the sides, so you’ll get a nice frame for your board. Then, paint the middle with a coat of chalkboard paint. Let it dry, and apply a second coat. When that dries, you can remove the tape, and the chalkboard will be ready.
You can get all students to tape their own boards, and you’ll be the painter. When the tiny boards are ready, they can use them to write answers to your questions.
8. Write A Choose Your Own Adventure
Write a collaborative class story in the style of “Choose Your Own Adventure.” Start a story and bring that story to a fork in the road. Allow students to write the optional paths that the story can take. Once you have a couple of student-written options, continue the story in the same way. If you have older students, it’s fun to put them in small groups. Tell the groups they need to have at least three branches, and when everyone is done, trade stories and read each other’s adventures.
9. Vocabulary Challenge
Pick a new word for the students to learn. Think of something unusual. Explain the word. Tell them to use it in a sentence. Then, tell them to write a short story around that sentence. If you turn this into a team activity, it will be more fun.
10. Typing Challenge
The students love this one! Students have to learn how to type, right? This is a fun way to practice writing and typing! You can project a Google Doc and call up a student to write for one minute. The next student will add on to what the first student wrote for one minute. One after another, the students work together to write a (HILARIOUS) short story. They felt like real writers. Grab a free digital composition notebook to use with this strategy.
We, teachers, have to be fun. It’s a choice, but it’s the right one to make. With a bit of creativity and effort, we can make even the most challenging aspects of learning easy on them.
20 Creative Writing Activities for Elementary Students
Writing activities have an emotional toll on young learners, given the sheer volume of letters to learn by heart, words to spell, and sounds to remember. Your students will be more excited doing tasks they consider easier, such as character description. Perhaps it’s time you considered introducing fun activities to help the learners in their writing. Here are 20 of our go-to fun activities for creative writing skills among elementary kids.
1. Writing a Comic Strip
Create a comic book idea, leaving the speech bubbles around the characters empty for the students to fill. Alternatively, you can source the comic from your favorite magazine or author and rub out the dialogue between the characters for the learners to complete.
Learn more: My Cup Runs Over
2. Mad Libs
Have the students copy a few paragraphs from a famous book. Ask them to erase words they wish to remove and replace them with a blank line. Under the space, the students should give a hint to indicate the required type of phrase or word.
Learn more: My Cup Runs Over
3. Vocabulary Challenge
Select a new word for the learners and explain its meaning to them. Ask them to create a sentence using the new term. Tell them to practice writing an entire story based on this word.
Learn more: First Cry Parenting
4. Using an I-Spy Jar
Ask a reluctant writer to practice writing their names by fetching and arranging all the letters that make it. For an older writer, ask them to pick an object from the jar, redraw it and give a brief description of what it is or the scene.
Learn more: Imagination Tree
5. Identifying Objects
This reading and writing game is suitable for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten-aged students. Ask them to color the object highlighted in the descriptive sentence. It enhances their fine motor skills, memories, and emotion.
Learn more: Kids Learning with Mom
6. Picture Dictionary
The goal of picture dictionaries will help early learners who are struggling with creative writing exercises and reading skills. Ask children to match the words provided at the top to the activities being performed in the pictures. This reading and writing activity can be developed for individuals, families, or the classroom.
Learn more: Childrensbooks
7. Journal writing
Journal writing works for learners who excel in creative stories or drawing. Have your students engaged in daily writing tasks. For instance, what food did they eat for lunch or a boring character in a favorite piece of writing?
8. Roll a Story
Roll a story will have the learners enjoy rolling dice to discover the character or scene they will be exploring in their writing. Examples of a scene they can get include casino, school, or ancient pyramid.
Learn more: Teachers Pay Teachers
9. Copy-writing
On a drawing paper, make a word entry and ask the pupils to highlight it with a paintbrush or crayon. These creative writing exercises' goal is to enhance the learner’s artistic, emotional, and fine motor skills.
Learn more: Little Learners
10. Pass-it-on Story Writing
This writing game engages the language input of creative writing classes. Write the first scene of a story on a piece of paper. Have the learners come up with a sentence that continues the story. The paper is then passed on to the next child until every student has written something.
Learn more: Minds in Bloom
11. Sentence Scramble Writing
This writing activity's goal is to help children to improve their writing and sentence-building abilities. Ask the child to cut out the words at the bottom of the paper and rearrange them correctly to form a sentence.
Learn more: Twinkl
12. Picture Writing Prompts
Creative writing prompts activities test not only imagination but also a learner’s ability to make conversation on behalf of characters. Provide an entry with a picture accompanied by 3-4 writing prompts to guide them in exploring the scene. A sample question for the scene above will be, “Do the lambs feel safe with the lion?”
Learn more: Homeschool Adventure
13. Cut Out My Name
Help your kindergarten students in writing their names with this fun writing activity. Print out the learner’s name. Next, print the letters of the pupil’s name and mix them with a few random characters. Cut them apart and ask them to sort out the letters in their name.
Learn more: Simply Kinder
14. Cards
Writing cards helps students to engage in purposeful moments. Provide the learners with blank holiday or birthday cards. Ask them to draw or write something to the card’s receiver. Alternatively, students can design their cards and write down the desired message.
Learn more: Learn with Homer
15. Grocery List
Sit down with the child and help them write a list of healthy food items or other household objects you require. In the grocery store, have them cross out the items as they are added to the shopping cart.
Learn more: Kids Night in Box
16. Label a Diagram
Engage your child’s reading and writing abilities by printing out a diagram of simple objects such as flowers, insects, or external human body parts. Provide a list of the answers to the parts and ask them to write the word that matches each in the blank space.
Learn more: Classroom Freebies Too
17. Disappearing Words
On a chalkboard, write down a word. Ask the learners to erase the word with a wet sponge. This way, the learners will learn how to design the letters of the alphabet. Although this writing activity is the opposite of copywriting, they both serve the same purpose.
Learn more: Little Learners
18. Write a Story Based on the Ending
Test your student’s creativity by providing them with writing prompts that focus on an entire book, a song, or a famous story. For instance, ask students to write a story based on the ending, “And they lived happily ever after."
Learn more: Kid Pillar
19. Found Poetry
Collect words or a group of words from a favorite story or song. You can either write them on a piece of paper or cut them out of a printed page. The overall goal is to rearrange the words differently to make an interesting poem with a unique writing style or genre.
Learn more: Homeschooling Ideas
20. Sticky Notes Story
Learners may have much to say in conversation prompts but get stuck when doing the actual writing. Sticky notes will help them in aspects of writing. A student can write anything ranging from a favorite author, a favorite food, or fantasy elements.
Learn more: Teaching Made Practical
WRITTEN SPEECH SITUATION. What is it and why is it important for a preschooler? "Is he talking already?" - a question that parents around ask with anxious curiosity. "Speaks" - at first, in relation to a two-year-old child, it means "explains with words, indicates his desires or protests with words, answers his questions with words." We recorded: yes, speech has become a way for the child to communicate, to communicate. But such “speaking” is just the start of speech development. These are no longer separate sound complexes with a vague meaning, but recognizable grammatical constructions. And the words in these constructions begin to acquire a meaning close to that which is fixed by dictionaries. After all, those “words” that the child utters up to this point are not words in the usual sense. They have a different capacity, they replace detailed statements and cannot be attributed to any part of speech. The word “mom”, for example, for a one-year-old baby means many, many different things, depending on the situation: “give”, and “scary”, and “I want to handle” and “please, caress”. In other words, at the moment when a young child “speaks”, speech as such is just beginning to take shape. And this is a complex, multi-stage process. It is believed that a child masters speech as a way of communication by the age of five. By this age, he should already have a fairly rich vocabulary, build basic grammatical structures, use speech as a means of self-expression. Actually, this latter is the main indicator of the development of speech: developed speech allows you to compose. But all these achievements of the child so far exist only in one plane - in the plane of oral speech. When he goes to school, he will have an incredibly difficult task: to learn to do all this also in writing. What is more difficult - oral or written speech - is a debatable question. Of course, writing in itself is a complex activity. Writing is difficult. At first glance, it's harder than talking. But writing in writing allows drafts, the search for formulations, narrative constructions, and the selection of linguistic means. Oral speech should immediately be born clear and expressive. Different people are given different forms of speech in different ways: it depends on the individual characteristics of the individual. But in the process of development, oral and written speech influence each other and stimulate the improvement of each other. | What does all this have to do with a small child? To the problems of speech development in kindergarten? Something, let alone self-expression in writing, is definitely not a preschool activity. That's right. But it turned out that it is possible to create the so-called "situations of written speech" for preschoolers, and this is an effective means of developing children's speech, its most complex - monologue form. In the “written speech situation”, the child himself does not write anything. He only talks, and his speech is recorded by an adult. Not everything that is recorded for the child is a product of the situation of written speech. You can write down funny words and expressions for children, you can keep records of observation of children's play, fixing children's phrases and dialogues. This is completely different. The situation of written speech should be specially organized when the child knows that you are writing down for him. When he composes a text specifically “for the record”, he “dictates” to an adult. And an adult fixes oral speech, turning it into signs. This is a kind of magic, magic. After all, what is happening? Hearing but invisible becomes visible but inaudible. What the child has said does not dissolve, does not disappear. An adult, even after the passage of time, will be able to reproduce exactly what the child composed Why is this so important? First, this is an object lesson on the topic: "What is the meaning of writing?" And the child learns about this meaning not from the obsessive and incomprehensible reasoning of an adult, but from his own experience. This is a kind of propaedeutics, anticipatory actions that create a motive in a preschooler to master a new type of activity. Considering how much sweat and blood it costs a first grader to learn to write, the motivation must be very strong. Secondly, scientists note that in the situation of written speech, children's speech behavior changes. They involuntarily begin to speak a little slower, their phrases become longer and more complex. Explanations for these changes vary. At some point, the child already has an image of written speech (if this is a normal child who is read to from time to time). He intuitively feels that written speech is associated with more complex grammatical structures and "is not cut down with an ax." In addition, in a situation of written speech, he turns out to be the main one, and an adult must follow him, obey the logic of actions set by the child - and this is a very acute experience. For the child write down his fantasies! That is, they show interest in him, in what is inside him. After all, words, whatever one may say, are born "from the inside." In other words, the situation of written speech turns out to be a powerful means of developing the oral speech of a preschooler, mobilizing his speech resources. You just need to organize it correctly. Let us formulate some rules that allow us to psychologically correctly build a situation of written speech. The child needs to be offered an interesting, close, personally important topic for him. From this point of view, it is wrong to invite children to write a story about winter or about seasonal signs of autumn. This topic is traditional, didactic, but has nothing to do with the inner life of the child. And stories from pictures are not suitable for a situation of written speech. And even stories according to the plan. Here you need to give the child the freedom to improvise. Questions need to be asked burning ones, to which he will internally respond. “Who and what do I play with in kindergarten?”, “I have toys at home”, “what gift will I ask Santa Claus for?”, “What happened when I was sick?”, “I dream that I got a kitten." You can offer “provocative” topics, having previously found out from the children what they do not like: “Why do I not like Monday?”, “Why do I not like to sleep during the day?”, “What do I like and what do I not like to eat at lunch?”, "When do I get offended?" and so on. Only when the child has gained some experience in speaking out on topics that are meaningful to him/herself, can one move on to inventing fantastic or magical stories. And - again - in this situation, the main character of such stories should be a child. He talks about himself, about his desires. The adult who organizes the situation must show the child that it is very important for him what he says. Important and interesting. Therefore, he is ready to record for the baby. The child should be able to see how an adult writes behind him. From time to time, you need to show the child the text that the children's story has turned into. From time to time to clarify: “I wrote it down like this. Did you say that? No? Then I'll cross out. Say it again to be more precise." Strikethrough is acceptable because an adult is working on a draft. Very bathroom remark, and the child needs to know about it. Finally, at the end, be sure to read the entire text to the baby. After all, this is the result. This is the result of the "transformation" of oral into written. You can create additional motivation for the child storyteller. For example, to promise that the text will be beautifully designed. The result must again be shown to the child and it is obligatory to read what was written down: this is what the child said. Even if he himself had already forgotten something, on paper in writing, his words were preserved. The situation of written speech can be organized for children from the age of four and a half - when they "ripen" to collective games, when their social experience begins to noticeably expand and communication becomes more diverse. The effect of using the situation of written speech is especially noticeable in interaction with five-year-olds and six-year-olds. And the effect is connected not only with pre-school preparation. The situation of writing, organized in the family, is a great way to develop relationships between parents and children. |
The development of written language in a child. Fundamentals of General Psychology
Development of written speech in a child
A very significant acquisition in the speech development of a child is his mastery of written language. Written speech is of great importance for the mental development of the child, but mastering it also presents some difficulties. These difficulties are already evident in teaching reading, i.e., understanding written speech. Reading is not just a mechanical operation of translating written characters into speech. To learn to read, first of all, the development of appropriate technical skills is necessary, but technical skills alone are not enough. Since reading includes reading comprehension, it is a kind of mental operation. Understanding oral speech also involves intellectual activity on the part of the listener. But reading, that is, understanding written language, is a more difficult operation than understanding oral speech. In oral speech, intonations, pauses, voice underlining, a whole range of expressive means contribute to understanding. Using them, the speaker, as it were, interprets what he said and reveals the text of his speech to the listener. When reading, it is necessary, without the help of all these auxiliary means, relying on the text alone, having determined the relative proportion and the correct ratio of the words included in the given text, to give it an independent interpretation. The task to be solved is to correctly reconstruct its content as a semantic whole, according to the words of the text, which give a set of reference points, as it were, the conditions of the problem. Independent reading presupposes a certain mental development and in turn leads to further mental development. In particular, by reading, the child learns to build his speech in a new way.
The mastery of writing is also very important. At the first stages of mastering written speech, this latter usually lags behind oral speech in many respects. A child who, by the time he begins to master written speech, already has considerable experience of communication through oral speech, at first, naturally, is more fluent in this latter. First of all, mastering the very technique of writing presents some difficulties for the child; and these difficulties cannot but affect the level of written speech. In addition, there are also psychological differences in the nature of written and oral speech. Mastery of oral speech plus the technique of writing does not yet give mastery of written speech. She proposes and gives more. This is an art that needs to be learned, and the child, of course, does not immediately master it. But when a number of researchers, both foreign and Soviet (for example, R. Gaupp, L.S. Vygotsky), one-sidedly emphasizing the differences between written and oral speech, argue that written speech in general in a child is several (almost 7) years behind from oral, then this provision needs a significant restriction. There is no doubt that the written speech of the child often reveals, along with an undoubted lag in some respects, certain advantages over his oral speech in other respects; it is for the most part more planned, systematic, thought out; being less common, it is sometimes more condensed than less complete.
In the development of speech, the differences between written and oral speech and their commonality are actually manifested; it also affects their interaction. At first, naturally, oral speech dominates; it determines the written language of the child; the child writes as he speaks: the forms of oral speech developed in him determine at first the structure of his written speech.
But even in written speech a number of expressive moments of oral speech inevitably fall out; if they are not replenished by a proper restructuring of its subject-semantic content, written speech, as a result, turns out to be poorer than oral speech. In the future, written speech, with the requirements of thoughtfulness, logic, coherence that it imposes, begins to have a significant impact on the development of oral speech - in the form that is needed to answer the teacher, for a coherent presentation of educational, scientific material.
The main link in the development of written speech is the development of coherent speech - the ability to display in speech all the essential connections of subject content so that the semantic content of speech forms a context that is understandable to another. The development of coherent - contextual speech significantly depends on the development of written speech. A study of the written speech of a schoolchild, conducted by A.S. Zvonitskaya, shows how only gradually a high school student begins to cope with the difficulties associated with building a coherent, understandable context for the reader. In the course of the presentation, the relationship between the author's thought and the reader's thought changes from stage to stage. In the beginning, the distance between the thought of the writer and the reader is greatest. When the writer starts writing the material, all the material is already known to him. The reader must be brought into it. This is all the more necessary because the presentation always to some extent includes not only some objective content, but also the attitude of the writer to it. In this regard, specific tasks arise that must be resolved in the introduction, then others - in the presentation and, finally, in the conclusion, when it is necessary to summarize the entire presentation in the light of the attitudes from which the writer proceeds: building a coherent context understandable to the reader, requires special techniques and resources. Special work is required to master these means. <…>
Connectivity of speech in the above sense of the word is associated with its precision . Any scientific speech must be accurate. The development of accurate speech is one of the essential tasks of the culture of speech, especially important for the development of scientific thinking. Such speech can be called exact in which the words are terms , and their meanings are concepts . The word becomes a term, because, freeing itself from the incidental, random, superficial content, it is entirely determined from the context of a certain system of knowledge. A historical term is defined only in a historical context, a mathematical term in a mathematical one; term is a contextual word. The ability to use the words of scientific speech as terms and the ability to realize their exact terminological meaning are an essential aspect in the development of speech. <…>
The development of coherent and accurate speech falls mainly during the time of study in secondary school.
In adolescence and youth, in connection with mental development, especially with a good culture, speech, both written and oral, becomes more and more rich, multifaceted, more and more literary: in connection with the acquisition of scientific knowledge and development in the learning process thinking in concepts, speech becomes more adapted to the expression of an abstract thought. The words already at the child's disposal acquire a more generalized, abstract meaning. In addition to the semantic development of the available vocabulary, a number of new special terms are included in speech - technical scientific speech is developing. Along with this, in the speech of a teenager, its emotional and expressive - lyrical and rhetorical - moments appear brighter than in a child studying in elementary school. There is a growing sensitivity to form, to the literary presentation of what is said and written; the use of metaphorical expressions becomes more frequent. The structure of speech - especially written - becomes more or less significantly more complicated, the number of complex structures increases; someone else's speech, which until then was cited mainly in the form of direct speech, is transmitted more often in the form of indirect speech; in connection with the expanding circle of reading and the emerging skills of working with the book, quotations are beginning to be introduced; sometimes there is, mainly in the written speech of a teenager and a young man, some flamboyance; it appears as a result of a well-known disproportion between the intensity of experience and speech means for its adequate objectified and yet quite vivid expression.
This text is an introductory fragment.
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