At Primary Tutor Project we often find that children’s creative writing can lack a certain spark. Do you find this with your child’s creative writing? Although important, the focus in schools on grammar; fronted adverbials, conjunctions, punctuation, means that often the ideas for writing are secondary when writing is taught in school. From experience, we have found that this can be drastically improved with some guidance and simple changes. Here are some of the top tips we use to help inject some colour into primary-school children’s creative writing.
Creative writing is an essential skill for every primary school child to master as they develop. Currently, under the National Curriculum it is expected that children in Key Stages 1 and 2 can articulate their ideas in an age-appropriate way and structure their thoughts and ideas properly in a writing format.
Unfortunately, creative writing doesn’t come naturally to all children, and it is something that needs to be nurtured and worked on. So how can your child take that plain piece of writing and turn it into something that stretches the imagination?
Natural Storytellers
Children are natural storytellers – they have enormous imaginations which are evident in their creative games and ways they can occupy themselves! Encouraging your child to talk about the ideas in their head and develop them verbally can be hugely beneficial. It is a great way to build their confidence and develop their vocabulary. This will also help in the transition from story ideation into creative writing.
Character Development
Good stories will generally start with a strong lead character. A novel way to help develop a good main character is to start by drawing it. Then writing descriptions all around the picture: what is her name? Where does she live? Who’s in her family?, will help the creative juices flow. Drawing the character allows the child to think in a more descriptive way compared to solely being focused on writing.
Adjectives
Then, get your child to write an initial draft of their idea. Once this is complete, get them to go back and add adjectives, adverbs and other strong vocabulary to make the writing flow better. Get your child to experiment with words here. Try using a thesaurus to further develop their vocabulary. Googling synonyms is great too!
Write based on experience
It’s important that your child writes about what they know, despite their relative lack of life experience. Try and encourage your child to observe life around them and how people interact – even the experience of losing a shoe could be turned into a reflective and interesting story!
From thrillers to adventures, real life stories to poetry, there’s a whole range of writing styles that your child can experiment with. They’ll be actively encouraged to try out as many as possible at school. At Primary Tutor Project, we actively utilise all types of writing styles and techniques to encourage creativity. If your child is struggling feel free to contact us here at Primary Tutor Project where we can offer some advice on how to improve your child’s creative writing.
Some helpful resources can be found-
You’ll find free creative writing planning resources and tips here.
More inspiration here
And some great resources here.
