Writing is a crucial skill to teach your children, as it will be needed in every aspect of life, whether it’s education, socialization, using technology, etc. Writing is a must-do activity, and creative writing holds a prominent place. It develops their imaginations, critical thinking, and self-expression.
This will further create a good pitch for their future writing skills and command over the language. Therefore, we should nurture our children’s writing abilities. It might not be easy to develop writing skills, but by incorporating some fun and learning activities, we can contribute to their creativity and imagination. For instance, by introducing them to good storybooks and developing a culture of journaling, we can induce creative writing skills.
Let’s explore our topic in detail and explore how to improve your child’s creative writing skills in the article below.
Encourage Reading
Reading books has always been the best way to let your creative juice flow. Encouraging your child to read is a great prototype to build their creative skills. Introduce story books and let your child read and interpret them on their own.
Make a daily habit of reading different kinds of books and child magazines to let them experience a variety of writing styles. Continuous exposure to words, ideas, and different writing styles builds the ability to imitate them. This expands their vocabulary, improves their reading skills, and exposes them to different writing styles.
Moreover, you can also give them comics and interpret the stories to boost their inner creativity. In the beginning, you might feel they are replicating these books, but soon, they will learn to adapt and modify words with their creativity. Thus, reading is a good practice to inspire and influence your child’s writing skills.
Foster Storytelling Approach
Storytelling is found to be an excellent activity for igniting your child’s imagination and enhancing their creative skills. Narrate different stories to them and ask them to bring interesting and imaginative stories to the table.
You can ask them to describe day-to-day activities as stories or build stories on their own rather than just focusing on storybooks. Play a major part in their story and give them different hooks to build their imaginations.
You can also present your idea and ask them to build a complete story for that or try telling them a story and intentionally stuck in between to ask what they have in mind. This develops creativity, develops plot structure, and enhances their ability to write what they are narrating, ultimately boosting their writing skills.
Develop Journaling Habit
Journaling is a great option for developing writing habits and teaching children to write down their feelings and activities. Get them a journal and make them write about their daily routine, issues they encounter, what makes them feel good/bad or different emotions, how their school went today, etc.
It is a good way for them to express feelings, work through their emotions, and handle them without external help. Penning down emotions develops emotional intelligence and teaches them to tell what they feel without embarrassment, advice, or recrimination.
Discuss what they wrote in the journal otherwise, respect their privacy if they want to. Let your child feel like it’s a safe place for them to write in without any judgment. Moreover, a dream journal is also a good way of transferring creativity over paper. Ask them to write whatever comes in their dream and complete it in case they wake up before the dream ends.
Learn to Play With Grammar Rules
Correct spelling and grammar matter a lot to us as adults. We might not think of using wrong helping verbs or adjectives in our daily conversations or committing typo errors in our letters or documents. However, let your child learn to play with grammar rules if you don’t want to halt their creative writing process.
Let them write the way they are doing. They might be using the wrong spelling at first or writing in improper sentence structures, but that is all okay for them as budding writers. However, gradually introduce them to grammar and proper sentence-making rules. You can get help from technology and guide them through their mistakes with a grammar checker online.
This can be extremely helpful for a child who is learning how to write or trying hard to improve. Watching their mistakes and possible corrections in real time lets them learn how to do it in the future. Ask them to practice writing and consult grammar checkers for corrections that provide the writing assistance they need.
Conclusion
Children need to learn the importance of writing in their lives, and parents should encourage them to write whatever they like. Creative writing is a good start to developing good writing skills. You can offer different activities to let their creativity shine through. Fostering storytelling games, encouraging reading practices, developing the journaling habit, and letting them play with words and grammar allow your child to be masters of their imaginative world and pen down the way they like.
However, grammar is the backbone of a language, and its rules should be properly followed in every type of writing, whether academic, creative, or technical. In the beginning, you can allow your child to break and play with them; however, as they gain command over creative writing, introduce them to grammar check options and allow them to write precisely.
