Homeschoolers tend to like to encourage their kids to write regularly, but it is not always a pain-free endeavor. Freewriting is an excellent practice, but many kids freeze when staring at a blank page.
TheHomeSchoolMom is offering a set of printable prompts for each month of the academic year with ideas to start kids off if they need it.
Feel free to let your students illustrate their work if they want to - often creativity that expands to coloring, drawing borders, or adding fancy lettering to start a paragraph can get kids more interested in the activity.
You may even find that your child benefits from having a scribe, someone who will record his words, to free up his focus on the creative process.
In order to encourage children to develop their writing voices, it's a good idea to separate this exercise from any criticism over spelling, grammar, or sentence structure. Instead, this is the time for the child to be creative, exploring and recording.
Later, when she is confident in her own voice, work on structure and proofreading can be added in with separate work (such as a "Bring Me Bad Writing" activity) to develop those habits. This, however, is not that time. This is about finding one's voice and expressing it with confidence. Enjoy these prompts or let your kids create their own topics.
Mary Ann Kelley lives in coastal North Carolina with her husband and has two grown daughters, both homeschool and college graduates. Mary Ann, who homeschooled for almost 20 years, is a Virginia Tech graduate and lifelong learner. Mary Ann has been featured in interviews on Money.com, HuffPost, and in the Free Lance-Star newspaper. Her desire is for the content on TheHomeSchoolMom to encourage and empower parents and children to take personal responsibility for their own educational options and choices. In her free time, Mary Ann enjoys reading, traveling, genealogy, and volunteering for the Atlantic Beach Sea Turtle Program.
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