A Wintry Writing Prompt For Kids

From Cheryl's Writing Crate

In addition to my own love of writing, I'm also passionate about helping kids get creative in some way, shape or form in the written word.  For the past six years I've been the adviser of our middle school's newspaper club.  Our paper has grown leaps and bounds since we started producing it 6 years ago, and our student staff grew from 10 to 28.  

Not only do we publish our 16-page color paper four times a year, we are very fortunate to have it printed through a local newspaper, therefore giving our students a real journalism experience on authentic newspaper.  There's truly nothing like getting black newspaper ink all over your fingers when holding this student masterpiece each time it's published!

The student staff on our paper, The Mariners' Catch, participate in many different creative writing tasks each month to help build on their writing skills as well as stretch their imaginations.

With the holidays now in full swing, we found a jolly exercise involving snowmen that everyone really enjoyed.

The students all took turns reading the following book, Snowmen at Night, and then they brainstormed a list of all the things the snowmen did at night. They wrote 3 paragraphs, developing the characters in the first, describing the snowman's activity and a problem faced in the second and solving the problem in the third. The wide mix of ideas that stemmed from this project was fantastic, and we all voted for our top three stories at the end.

If you have kids that are looking for a creative challenge, you could try something similar and then sit back and be amazed at their wonderful stories.

What favorite writing prompt ritual do you follow to get your creative juices flowing?