Do you need a quick way to stimulate your child’s creativity on a day where they are severely unfocused or uninspired? Bring them into Genie Academy to really get them rolling and then check out these ways to exercise the writing muscle that will have your child’s creativity blooming on any given day.
- Mad Libs
Always underrated but a great way to not only create a quick silly story, but it also gives you an opportunity to test your child’s grammar skills. Can they identify parts of a sentence? How is their vocabulary progressing? This gives you a quick and efficient way to tell if your child has the words that he or she needs to be successful in their own writing. By working together to craft a story, you create the time and space to not only play together but also learn together. With endless packs and ways to tell a story, this is a great way to reward your child after a long night of homework or other after-school activities.
- Debate
Is there a rule in the house that your child has been trying to get you to change your mind on? Of course, there is! There always are, and so instead of pleading and foot-stomping, tell your child to come up with a solid written argument. Both of you prepare to have a debate over why the rule should or should not stay in place. Get an audience member to listen to you both as you argue your cases and then reach a compromise. By preparing, writing, and enacting the debate your child will learn how to state their case while also learning how important it is to fight for what you believe in. This is also a form of writing that is practiced heavily in schools and is more aptly recognized as a persuasive essay.
- Magnet Poetry
Buy a magnetic poetry set. These go right on your refrigerator door and come in an array of packs and words. Essentially children choose from this word bank to create small lines of poetry or sentences that they can rearrange right on the door. They can keep the poems they love and break apart the lines they hate. They can play and create in an endless array and best of all it’ll keep them occupied anywhere from five minutes to an entire hour. Tell them to write down particularly memorable lines for later use in a piece of writing.
- Com
This website is a great tool for vocabulary building as well as exposing your child to new words and testing their knowledge on words they should already know. The site works by generating a word that you have to give the definition for, based on the number of words you get correct or incorrect the site generates the level of difficulty you should be on for that particular level of words. In addition to this, for every word you get correct the site donates 10 grains of dry rice through the World Food Programme to help end hunger. What a great way to grow vocabulary while also teaching your child to be conscientious about the world—not to mention makes a great topic for your child to write about.
