Do this to Make Creative Writing Fun for Your Homeschool

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Journal prompts or small ungraded writing assignments are a fantastic way to make writing more fun and help your child explore the idea of being creative. Think of these journals as creative training wheels. We have been using the My Year of Writing Journal in our homeschool with my high school kids with great results.

What Are Good Writing Results?

What do I mean by great results? When I look in their books, they have writing in them! This is my main goal with adding the Year of Writing Journal. The number one goal of any independent learning tool is getting your kids to use it.

The Second sign of success; some of their stories from the prompts are pretty funny. We both laugh I read the funny parts, or even better they actually seek me out to share a good one now and then.

Win the Creative Writing Battle

When I speak to homeschool families one reoccurring theme I discover is that writing is difficult subject for at least a few kids in every family. How do we win this battle?

By realizing it is not a battle. It’s a party and the theme is creativity. What can we do to make writing more fun and less stressful on us as parents?

Build a better invitation to Creative Writing

Good Writing Prompts
Less Glaring White Space
Lots of Choices
Less (no) Critique
Yes to Doodling, scribbles and imperfect
Do some Exercises Orally if Physical Writing is a Barrier to Success
Remember the Assignment: Creativity

REMEMBER THE ASSIGNMENT

As homeschooling parents, we need to understand the assignment. A huge turning point in my teaching process came when I began asking myself, “What is the end goal of this lesson?”

Is the goal grammar and spelling? I am going to make the needed corrections. If it is a science term, the spelling needs to be right, but I am not going to bust on my kids sentence structure in their lab notes.

If you want to break a child’s enthusiasm for writing start marking up a story they shared with you on their own time. Nothing will make them stop sharing their ideas with you faster.

If you have done this in the past and are just now seeing it as a creativity breaker; go and apologize to your child. Let them know that you want to be a safe place to hear their ideas and stories. Then mean it. Be someone they can trust to share their first drafts with.

Creative Time is for Rough Drafts

My Year of Writing journal I will get them used to being creative. Creative is fast paced. Creative is not structured. Creative is silly and outlandish. Creative is raw and honest.

Creative time is where great rough drafts are built. Where a single ideas is born and where a great character is discovered. These things happen right next to a thousand other bad ideas, terrible rough drafts and dead ends.

Give your students place to be these things in their school day too.

What Do I Do if I See Grammar Issues?

If you are reading your child’s journal entries and there are some reoccurring spelling issues, STOP, don’t do anything. This is your parenting test.

Can you accept shortcomings and face the true learning curve? It is hard, but the good news is that your child is still your student. They will be learning for the rest of their lives. After all, I am still learning how to spell some words correctly. Though I finally have entrepreneur down! We are all students, let them know learning never ends.

Next, get creative and build out lessons that address those issues in your English and Language Arts time. I am not saying to neglect great writing methods, spelling and grammar. I am saying to address this in the correct atmosphere. The lessons will be better received when they are presented here.

Get into the Creative Writing Fun!

The prompts in the My Year of Writing Journal have been so much fun that I picked up a creative journal for myself the last time I went to the bookstore. Maybe I’ll be sharing a story with my kids in the next few weeks. Wouldn’t that be a fun way to inspire your kids to write.

The Year of Writing journal is part of the Timberdoodle 10th Grade Curriculum Kit the we are using with our three teens this year. You can watch some of your reviews and the unboxing on YouTube!