Creative Family Fun

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Writing Activities for Kids

Beach Ball Poetry

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Summer is winding down, but there’s still time to bridge that gap between school and vacation with a fun writing project. Some of my favorite writing projects don’t include paper at all. With this project, we took a summer toy and turned it into poetry. Beach ball poetry was fun, easy, and didn’t feel like work at all.

You don’t need many supplies for this project, just a beach ball, some permanent markers, and a couple of creative minds. We took our project outdoors to get some inspiration from the world around us. My original plan was to have the girls write a poem about summer on the beach ball. If you’ve been around this blog enough, you’ll notice that often the girls often have ideas of their own. I’ve learned over time to just let go of my ideas and have them run with their own. The project always turns out better than I ever anticipated.

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Instead of a poem about summer, the girls wrote poems about the seasons. They chose three seasons only because there wasn’t enough room on the beach ball for all four. They wrote a short poem about each season in the color sections and illustrated their poem on the white sections. My role because the official beach ball holder, spelling helper, and umbrella drawer.

The girls wrote free-form poems. We didn’t worry about rhyming, line length, rhythm, or anything else. They just wrote descriptions of the seasons. They each took turns writing a line. They wrote about swimming, watching flowers grow, and playing in the snow. It was so much fun and so inspiring.

Have you ever written a poem on something other than paper? I’d definitely encourage it! The surface inspires the poem. It’s fun. It’s quirky. And, the creativity just starts flowing when you mix things up.

Find a beach ball and have some writing fun. Your kids will have fun and writing won’t feel like a chore.

Flower Personification ~ For After School Writing Fun

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Have you ever tried giving human characteristics to something nonhuman? It’s called personification and it’s a fun way to get kids hooked on writing. They may not realize it, but they’re probably very familiar with personification. It’s prevalent in many movies (Cars, Toy Story), tv shows (Doc McStuffins, Thomas & Friends) and children’s books (Corduroy, Otis, or The Little Engine That Could). And, those are just a few examples I could come up with off the top of my head. Recently, I set up this personification activity for my daughter to give her a little after school writing practice.

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Supplies Needed:

Pictures of flowers
Notebook paper
Glue
Markers
Pen or pencil

Set-Up:

To set-up the project, I found several close-up pictures of flowers to print. I used the search term “flower” in the Creative Commons search and found many choices. (The Creative Commons is a great place to find royalty-free images to use for projects such as this.) I downloaded several different pictures, added them to a Word document, and printed in black-and-white. You could also search through coloring pages to find your images. Finally, I cut out each image and glued them to the top half of a sheet of notebook paper. The process was simple and only took a few minutes of my time.

When Miss First Grader got home from school, I had the sheets all ready for her. I let her pick out a flower then gave her a writing challenge.

Use the marker to give your flower a face and turn it into a person. Once you’re done, give your flower a name and then write four sentences about your flower person.

Since this was our first time doing this project, I guided her through the writing a bit. I asked questions such as: “Where does your flower live?” “What do they like to do?” “What are some of their favorite things?” I tried to get her thinking about her flower as a person and not just a flower.

Miss First Grader named her flower Daisy. Daisy is 6 years old, likes pizza, and is always happy. I love to see her imagination at work!

Is your child not interested in flowers? Look for pictures of vehicles, buildings, trees, or toys instead.

Make it a family adventure!
Cost: Under $5. You probably have everything you need already.
Planning time: 30 minutes. Most of your prep time will be spent finding images and printing.
Ages: 6 and up. This project is best enjoyed by kids who are comfortable writing. If you want to do this with a younger child, let them dictate their ideas and a parent or older sibling can help with the writing.
Time needed: Around 30 minutes

If you want to do this as a family adventure instead of an afterschool project, add in sharing time. Let everyone take turns acting out their flower character. It’s fun to see where everyone’s imagination takes them!

Making Lists: After School Writing Practice

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I’ve got a reluctant writer. I’m sure I’m not alone. Miss First Grader is usually very confident when it comes to school. She loves math and thinks it’s fun. She’s a voracious reader. But writing… well, she’s just not feeling very confident with her abilities. Writing is so important for school success. It crops up in just about every subject. I want her to feel comfortable with the process.

In order to boost her confidence, I’ve decided to start adding a little bit of writing work into our after school learning. I promised her I’d make it fun and it wouldn’t be a big chore. I want to ease her back into the world of writing.

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The first thing we’re tackling is lists. Lists are fun! (Or at least I think so.) I decided to begin with lists because they only require words. She doesn’t have to construct sentences yet. We’ll get to that later. My goal is to get her thinking and brainstorming.

I created a simple list template. The lists are small and not too scary. I also brainstormed a list of topics. Some are imagination-heavy. Others are based in reality. Choose whatever you think will spark your child’s interest.

Example lists:

Flavors to sell at [your child’s name]’s ice cream shop
Animals to see at the zoo
Things I want to learn how to do
For sale at [your child’s name]’s toy store
The best pizza toppings
Rooms in a castle
My favorite foods
What I need for school
These are a few of my favorite things…

These are the ideas that work best for my daughter. Think about the things that get your child excited. You might choose such topics as: items to take on a camping trip, Rainbow Loom bracelets I want to make, favorite vehicles, favorite sports teams, etc. Really, anything works.

My goal is to get her to stretch her brain a little. We don’t spend a lot of time on this now, just one list a day. Eventually we’ll move on to other writing activities. But for now, this is the perfect warm-up exercise.

Do you want your own list-making sheets? I’ve uploaded the one I created for your convenience. Click the link below to download a copy. It prints as one page (landscape) with three lists on each page. Cut them apart and start creating lists.

Dad Libs: A Fun Father’s Day Surprise

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I’m usually good at coming up with crafts for just about any occasion.

The only exception is Father’s Day. That one stumps me every time.

So when the lovely folks at Martha Stewart Living contacted me and let me know about their printable Dad Libs card, I knew we had a winner. And, I knew I wanted to tell you about  it too.

The cards have a pretty frame on the front, so your little artists can draw their own picture of their dad, but then the fun starts inside.

The cards are full of fun fill-in-the-blank questions for your kids to answer.

The girls had lots of fun thinking of the answers and talking about how much they loved Creative Daddy.

I know I’ll have to apologize profusely to Creative Daddy for letting the girls try to guess his age. He’s no where near 50, poor guy, but at least 50 was better than her first guess… 100!

Since I’m a sneaky mommy, I also used this as a bit of after school writing practice for my Kindergartner, Lizzie, and made her write out all the answers herself.

I laughed when they answered “make money” for their dad’s job. Smiled when they said “My Dad is the best at… being silly,” and my heart melted when they said “I love my Dad because… I love him.”

We’re excited to give these cards to Creative Daddy and won’t even be waiting until Father’s Day. Luckily, his birthday comes sooner than Father’s Day. Unfortunately, that means I’ll have to come up with another idea for Father’s Day. Any ideas Martha??

You can find Dad Libs in the Good Things section of the June 2013 issue of Martha Stewart Living or online at this link: Dad Libs.

First image photo by Kate Mathis. Cover image and first image courtesy of Martha Stewart Living. Copyright ©2013.

For more Father’s Day craft ideas, check out www.marthastewart.com.

*Discloser: The wonderful folks at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia did contact me to let me know about Dad Libs. However, I’m telling you about it because I truly think it’s a fun & fabulous idea!

Poetry Basket for Creative Writing Fun

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We love poetry. We own a few kid’s poetry books and frequent the poetry section at the library.

We’ve experimented with writing our own poems and illustrating poetry.

Recently, I wanted to delve a bit deeper and see how we could be inspired by one poem. I was inspired by Montessori poetry baskets, but wanted to add in more elements to inspire my Kindergartner to do a little creative writing.

Disclosure: There are Amazon Affiliate and other affiliate links in this article which means, at no additional cost to you, we could receive compensation for our recommendations. You can read our full disclosure policy on our Disclosure Page for more details.

I started with the poem Who Has Seen the Wind? by Christina Rossetti. It’s a simple poem with beautiful imagery. I also knew the girls would easily identify with the poem. After all, we’ve experience many a windy day.

I printed out the poem and laminated it for durability.

I also printed out a few pieces of clip art of trees and leaves. I included felt leaves, small sticks, pine cones, and acorns.

I added some drawing paper, writing paper, and colored pencils to round out the basket.

You can do this with any poem. Just add items mentioned in or inspired by your poem of choice.

We read the poem aloud a few times.

We talked about the wind. We talked about ways in which we would see the wind.

Then we pulled out the drawing paper.

Drawing Prompts:

*If the wind were a person, what would it look like?

*Draw a tree with its leaves blowing in the wind.

*What are some other ways that we can “see” wind? Draw them.

After drawing for awhile, it was time to start writing.

I provided some writing paper that had a square at the top for a picture and 5 short lines for writing.

My daughter is just starting to get comfortable writing and I didn’t want to overwhelm her with too much space for writing.

Writing Prompts:

*Write an acrostic poem using the word WIND.

*Write a pretend conversation between you and your imagined wind person. What would you ask him/her? How would he/she answer?

*How many words can you come up with that rhyme with wind?

*Write a poem about your favorite part of nature. Will you write about the sun, the moon, trees, flowers?

We chose to write the acrostic poem. My daughter enjoyed this style of poetry when we first learned about it and she wanted to try it again.

The above poem is all hers… spelling mistakes and all. I think I’ll keep it forever!

We definitely got our creative juices flowing, because by the time we were done writing our poems, the girls wanted to make kites. We found some construction paper, markers, and yarn and made a couple of simple kites.

The girls loved the poetry basket so much that they’ve requested more poems. What poem should we choose next?