Writing, along with reading, is the two most powerful weapons we can give children to cement the foundations of their cognitive development. Unlike the learning of verbal communication (spoken language), literacy is much more complex, due to the need to acquire and learn to use certain codes of written language that require intellectual development. Therefore, the initiation does not usually occur until five or six years. Cheetahpapers helps to get more knowledge on creative writing for children.

 In this first approach, children will learn to distinguish their name and begin to write it, together with the different letters, which are associated with a specific form and sound. Little by little, the phases of copying, dictating and, finally, spontaneous writing follow one another. Before addressing creative writing in children, fathers, and mothers we must know the phases of learning in order to recognize problems in its development and practice. From the age of eight or nine, childhood abilities are already enough to start driving the learning and practice of creative writing.

The recommended age for creative writing in children

Starting at age nine, we enter the perfect age to encourage creative writing in children. We can do it at home or, if there is a visible interest in your part, study other options outside of school. Your practice will improve concept learning times, vocabulary and structural language knowledge. As a general rule, the taste for reading will be associated with all of the above, becoming the progressive approach of literary genres, themes, and authors. This association can also be extended to education in values, showing situations and realities that our sons and daughters must know and taking advantage of some of the creative writing activities and activities for children that you will find below.

Also read: Tips to help kids to prepare for an exam

In a group or workshop where creative writing is practiced with children, those who organize it will pose a huge variety of story development exercises, such as the circuit – also known as chained phrases -, through which a meaningful story will be formed. In the same way, there are many creative writing group exercises: writing texts in groups after choosing a certain number of words or collage, but also exercises that your son or daughter can begin to practice individually.

Creative writing activities for children

Here are some:

 Acrostic: We will write a meaningful phrase; next, each of the letters that starts the words of that phrase will be the letter with which the next sentence will begin. A challenge!

 Choose a different ending: We will work with a story, a story or a story that our son or daughter likes; We will ask you to change your ending and rewrite it, imagining what would have happened if …

Travel to another world: We will ask you what your ideal world would be like and prepare a story to describe it. We can also do this creative writing exercise for children with other periods of time in the history of mankind.

 Suggest words: A very fun creative writing exercise for children is to suggest some words without an apparent relationship (dog, folder and horizon, for example) and get them to imagine and write a story with them.

Topics of daily life: They will learn (and learn) a lot if we let children turn their most daily life experiences into writing: describe their first day of school, last Saturday, vacations or their favorite time of the week …

Practice creative writing with children outdoors: Take a walk on the beach, go for a walk in the historic center of the city or sit in a park and observe. Any writer has to learn to look around before writing: a good way to practice like professionals!

 Lengthen sentences: First, we are going to write a five-line story and then we are going to make it one often! In this way, through creative writing, the boy or girl will improve their morphosyntactic and semantic awareness and work on the details of the story.

 The magic box !: Although it is usually a group exercise, we can prepare our box with words of different syntactic categories (names, verbs, adjectives …) inside and let the boy or girl take three or four; we will do the same and each person will have to prepare two different sentences. Then, we will try to join the four sentences making sense of the text. It will awaken your attention a lot! Word.

Read poems aloud: The introduction to poetry is usually easier through reading. This exercise consists in choosing a poem and reading it aloud (it is best that the girl or the boy do it); Once read, we will have to look for what it suggests and what sense we think it makes.

 Describe a person: Perhaps one of the most typical exercises at school, but let’s turn it around! Normally, the descriptions work the physical, right ?; well, we are going to ask you to describe the most important thing about that person (his grandfather, an aunt, a friend) attending only three characteristics. Will they get it?

Also read: Tips to help kids to prepare for an exam

The importance of paper in creative writing for children

Children who exercise writing through paper improve their motor skills ( fine coordination ) and, according to experts, it also helps them retain information with greater intensity, enhances learning and neurodevelopment and helps stimulate their brain circuits, also developing other learning-related skills, such as drawing or coloring.

Likewise, creative writing, due to its more original and fanciful nature, should not make us forget the more purely linguistic aspect, so it will also be useful to correct spelling mistakes, textual coherence errors and thus, help our son or daughter continue to form.

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