4 Activities for Improving Written Expression at Home

If you're looking for some ideas to work on your written expression in a fun way at home, you'll want to read this!

Writing is one of the most complex skills that human beings must acquire. This cognitive capacity implies developing certain visual and motor coordination skills, as well as having attention and planning resources, mastering the grammar and spelling of a language, etc. To this end, it’s important that children learn to work on written expression from an early age, both at home and at school.

It’s also important to keep in mind that it’s not only the responsibility of schools to teach little ones certain basic learning, such as writing. Parents, too, must work from home to ensure that their children acquire these skills in an appropriate manner.

How can they go about it? In the following article, we’ll provide several good ideas for working on written expression at home.

4 activities to work on written expression at home

It’s important to work on written expression at home in a dynamic and fun way, as if it were a game. This is because children need to perceive the activities we propose to them as ways to spend time with family and as a means of entertainment. They shouldn’t see them as duties or obligations that they have to fulfill.

To achieve this, it’s essential for these activities to be enjoyable and for them to enhance children’s creativity and imagination. We’ll describe some written expression exercises that meet these requirements below.

1. Continue a story to work on written expression

A good idea for children to practice both reading and writing is to suggest an exercise in which they have to continue a story and write an ending for it.

To do this, you can select one of the stories you have at home and read it only halfway through. Then, your child can invent an ending that’s different from the author’s original idea. You can also choose to download files on the internet that exist for this purpose.

2. Write a recipe

Another good option to work on written expression at home is to write a recipe and then prepare it together as a family. Children will have to describe all the necessary steps very well, including the utensils and the ingredients that the recipe requires.

This activity is very motivating for children, since they see that the exercise has a practical use.

3. Making up a story from a series of words or drawings

You can also work on written expression with your kids with a game that consists of saying a series of random words out loud and inventing a story from them. This allows children to devise the introduction, the conflict, and the ending of a story in a free, clear, and precise way.

Another way to put this activity into practice is with story-telling dice, which you can purchase at any toy store. These include a series of drawings from which you must invent a story.

4. Writing a story from an image

Finally, another option is searching on the internet for an image that contains many details, or to make use of some drawing or photograph that you have at home. Based on what you see, write a completely original story.

Importance of written expression

Knowing how to write and express one’s thoughts and ideas correctly is fundamental in today’s society. Therefore, it’s important that children begin to develop this skill as soon as possible. That way, over the years, they can polish and improve it.

To facilitate this learning process for children, families should encourage writing at home. This doesn’t mean just carrying out activities and games like the ones we’ve mentioned. It’s also important for parents to teach by example and dedicate a few minutes a day to writing.

This way, children will see how their role models also make an effort to work on this aspect. After all, as Abraham Lincoln said, “Writing is the greatest invention in the world.”