When a child has a great imagination they can go on journeys in their own mind. They can become pirates sailing across the sea or astronauts exploring the vastness of space. For parents and teachers, it is important to encourage a child to create and imagine wonderful things in life. Writing is one way parents and teachers can help put a child's creativity to use.
By encouraging children to write stories, a child's imagination can be used to practice writing skills and to think critically and creatively. Children who learn to write down the stories they create are able to share the world's they are imagining for others to enjoy.
As children get older, writing skills become more important. To be successful in certain jobs or college a student needs to have skills in reading and writing. By learning these skills early on in life, children have time to hone their skills and learn the rules and guidelines for writing school papers, articles, stories, and more.
Children can learn to establish a style of writing that fits their own unique personality. Not all stories follow the same rules of writing. Children can be creative in how they present their work to readers. Some children may enjoy first-person perspective or writing about fantasy genres. Others my prefer sci-fi or non-fiction genres. In the world of stories, children can be creative and develop a way of writing they enjoy that fits the way they see a tale unfold in their own mind.
Tips To Encourage Children To Write Stories
Give them plenty of tools: paper, pens/pencils, access to a laptop with a word processor, and books for inspiration!
Read every story and tell the young author all the things you enjoyed.
You can never give enough praise for hard work!
Give the child tips on how to improve their work as the grow older and more advanced writers.
If you are a parent, read to your child. Those stories may inspire them to create new ideas for their own works of art.
Asking probing questions to help children think more critically about the stories they are writing about. This can help them think of more details and creative elements to include in their story.
Thanks for this post.
My 10 y.o son has to write stories quite often for school and when he really concentrates he actually writes very well, describing the characters and situations beautifully (there may be a bit of proud mother syndrome here :), but I genuinely think he is gifted for writing).
I always try and encourage him to invent stories and write them down in a notepad he could look back to later in time... but because he struggles with holding the pen and writing nice and clean letters, it is a real effort for him and he never wants to sit and write.
Offering access to a computer is a very good idea as he could fully concentrate on his imagination rather than stressing over calligraphy.
Thanks for the tips!
Keep posting and happy new year!
He is really gifted and I hope to read his work one day. The joy of any parent is to see their children doing quite well.
Great idea! You can always use the skill of writing and expressing ideas. So valuable. During Christmas I picked up about 20 small half lined, half plain for pictures, books for my kids for this purpose. Looking forward to reading their stories. And saving them for their memories and enjoyment.
Loved and upvoted your post. @silverwhale!
I'll note all these as I have a 4 year old toddler. This'll be very helpful! :D
In the old-fashioned days, [paper and pencil/pen] the access to age appropriate books were used to interest kids into reading, and from there into writing.
What young boy could refuse "Treasure Island"?
We’ve been having some issue with writing I have her keeping a journal but not creative writing book we will be starting this soon
This is great. I began writing short stories at age four, and I am so grateful to my parents for encouraging my love of books.