Creative Writing for Kids: A Parent’s Playbook to Inspiring Their Young Writers

Creative writing is a helpful skill for a child to learn. It is nurtured in school when students are given writing assignments, sometimes based on fictional topics.

For children, improving creative writing skills has many different benefits. It can make them more adept at expressing their thoughts, which can lead them to become better communicators. It can also help to improve their academic performance.

As a parent, you can do various things to inspire your children and improve their creative writing. In this post, we’ll look at some of them.

1. Create reading habits for your kids

Once kindled, young children's thirst for reading can be very strong. Instead of turning to other means of entertainment and distraction, you should give your kids books to read and involve yourself in their reading sessions.

Of course, since kids are kids, they have to be given something enjoyable and stimulating to their imaginations. Short stories, children’s books, fairy tales, etc., are the sort of stuff you should remember.

Along with introducing your children to books and encouraging them to read, you should also involve yourself in the process so that they find it more interesting. You can, for example, take turns with your child to read the book aloud to one another. You can also silently sit with your child, read the book together, and discuss it afterward.

This exercise will hook your child into reading and get them into a healthy reading habit. Once they are in the habit of reading regularly, they will start learning. They will learn new words and new styles/ways to write. After reading for a while, they will want to write a story of their own, in which they will try to use the same method of writing as the authors they read.

Some books and stories that you can get for your children include:

1. Grimm’s Fairy Tales: The classic collection of old-school fairy tales like The Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, etc.
2. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl is the popular story of Charlie, Willy Wonka, and the Giant Chocolate Factory.
3. The Twits by Roald Dahl: The story of the nasty Twit family who meat an ignominious end at the hands of the animals they terrorize.
4. The Famous Five books by Enid Blyton are a series of books about a group of four children and their dog who go on adventures and solve mysteries.
5. The Secret Seven books by Enid Blyton are pretty much the same as the Famous Five, except they are seven.

The funny thing is that this is not a list of books I’ve picked on the Internet. These are some of the books that I grew up reading. They formed a basis for the English writing skills that I now have and employ in writing articles and blog posts as a job.

1. Engage your kids in fun writing activities.

To inspire your kids further, you should engage them in writing activities to practice all they learn from reading. These activities also help the children to learn how to put their thoughts into words and explore different ways to write.

One good method of getting your kids to write is to give them story-writing prompts. You can, for example, give them a topic and tell them to write about it. To keep them interested and invested in the exercise, you can also take part in it and write on the same topic as them.

Once everyone is done, you can read the story written by your child and give them pointers on how to improve it. You can also share your story and show them what you wrote so that they can realize it’s a fun group project.

When giving feedback, you should maintain a positive and approving tone so that the children are not snubbed, leading them to abandon the exercise in the future.

Some things that you should guide your kid on when reading their work include:

• The grammatical correctness of their sentences
• Spelling and punctuation
• Flow and readability

Of course, in a more advanced and professional setting, there is a lot of other stuff to keep an eye on in content, but since you’re simply teaching your child, you can start with the basics.

1. Use online tools and apps to help your child improve their writing skills.

Another engaging way to get your child to improve their writing skills is to use online tools and applications. Kids can get somewhat bored if you keep repeating the aforementioned exercise in the same way over and over again. Every once in a while, you can use tools to help your child get feedback on their writing so that they can work on improving it.

For a person looking to improve their skills later in life, we recommend a totally different regime for using online tools and apps. However, for a child, we think that it can suffice to do only two things:

• Using online grammar and punctuation checkers to help them learn their grammar/punctuation mistakes
• Using online paraphrasers to help them improve the flow and readability of their content and learn how to word their sentences differently

Online grammar checkers are tools that look for errors in the provided content and provide the right solutions. You can have your child’s work checked through one of these tools and then show them the errors and their solutions. This will help your child to learn from their mistakes quickly.

Paraphrasers, or paraphrasing tools, are likewise available on the Internet. These tools serve the purpose of changing/modifying the content provided so that the meaning is not changed. You can use these tools to reword the stories/write-ups prepared by your kid and then show them how they can apply those techniques themselves.

For grammar checkers, we recommend using Grammarly, and for paraphrasers, we recommend using Paraphrasing.io. These are both popular tools, are free to use, and have excellent performance.

Wrapping up

Inspiring your kids to read and write and improve their creative writing skills is not very difficult. You can create a healthy writing habit, engage them in writing activities, and use online tools to help them learn and improve.

In the long run, having good creative writing skills can significantly help your kids. They can perform better in school by writing good assignments. Later on, it can also help develop good communication skills.