9 Creative Writing Activities for Kids

Creative Writing Activities for Elementary and Middle School Aged Kids—

Creative writing is more than just a critical component of your lesson plan: It’s a skill that can help students enhance just about any industry, field, or profession that they are interested in pursuing.

Whether you are an elementary school teacher who wants to add creative writing activities to your various lesson plans, or you are a middle school science teacher who wants to show students that writing is a part of daily life, these ideas will help you spark interest and innovation in your students.

These are just a few creative writing activities that can help get kids off to the “write” start ;)!

Creative Writing Activities for Elementary and Middle School Classrooms

Creative Writing Activity #1 — Make Excuses

Every teacher has had that one student who always has an excuse for why they didn’t do their homework. Get your students’ creative juices flowing by asking them to come up with 10 of the craziest reasons why they couldn’t complete their assignment last night.

Activity #2 — Transform Healthy Snacks into a Fun Treat

This would be an ideal creative writing assignment for a health and fitness class. Give your students the freedom to create (and describe) a healthy snack that would also be colorful, delicious, and fun!

Activity #3 — Give Directions

Use creative writing as a medium for helping students develop basic life skills. Ask students to write out directions from their home to their school, using proper directions as well as descriptive symbols that can help guide people along the way. After the assignments are complete, have the students test their directions to see if they were complete enough to get someone from one point to another!

Activity #4— Free writing

This is a creative writing activity that could be used in any subject. As the teacher, you should come up with one word or phrase that is relevant to your current lesson plan. Give the students five minutes to write anything that comes to mind after hearing that particular word.

Creative Writing Activities for the Classroom or Homeschool

Activity #5 — Musical Inspiration

To add a creative writing element to your music curriculum, choose a piece of classical music to play at a low volume in the classroom. Ask students to write about whatever comes to mind as they are listening to the music, noting that they should pay particular attention to the emotions and feelings that the music invokes in them.

Activity #6 — Field Trip Adventures

After a field trip to a local museum, zoo, or a different educational attraction, ask your students to write a piece of fiction that was based on their own experience. Encourage them to get descriptive while also incorporating the important storytelling elements, such as an inciting incident, a conflict, a climax, and a solution.

Activity #7 — Current Events Journaling

Provide students with resources about a current event taking place that is relevant to your curriculum. You could provide them with an online news article or ask them to watch a TV news documentary. After they have studied the event, ask them to write a journal entry that explains their own feelings and relationship to the current event that is taking place. In addition, ask them to look forward to the future and explore how the current event could be addressed in society.

Activity #8 — Letter Writing

Ask your students to consider someone from the past, present, or even future that they would like to send a letter to. Perhaps they want to contact a past president, like Abraham Lincoln, or maybe they want to write a letter to their future children. Encourage them to ask questions within their letter and to describe their own current situations. This helps them develop letter writing skills as well as creative writing skills.

Activity #9 —Living in a Different Country

This could be a creative writing assignment for a Social Studies or World History class. Ask the students to study a particular country in the world, one that they are not familiar with. After their research is complete, have them write a first-person account from the perspective of a child their own age living in that country. Have them explain the cultural traditions, their typical school day, and the types of foods that they enjoy on a regular basis in order to give them a perspective on how life is similar and different in other parts of the world.