SHARON’S BLOG

It’s summer. A sweet breeze of relief flows through the family tree and tickles the leaves. You hear a child giggle.

But you’ve worked hard on this year’s writing classes, and you want to make sure that your children’s writing skills don’t completely deteriorate during summer vacation. What can you do?

Summer is fun, and your children’s summertime writing activities can be fun for them and for you as well. Otherwise, it’s not really summer!

The most important feature of writing in summer is that nothing is graded or evaluated. This is all about infusing the act of writing with a positive attitude, which will carry over into writing for school and make it easier to swallow.

9 Writing Activities for Summer

Connect writing to real-life activities with these nine made-for-summer activities:

1. Chronicle an adventure.

Ask everyone to keep a diary or journal of the day’s events when on vacation or doing something out of the family’s routine. On a recent family vacation, I left a colorful notebook on the table and asked our adult children to write something in it each day. The results were interesting and had everything from their daily activities to humorous lists of “what I learned today.”

2. Be the sports reporter.

Children participating in team sports can write a summation of an exciting game as a sports reporter would, or they can write down how to play the game. The same goes for children participating in gymnastics, swim meets, survival camping, and so forth.

3. Write out arguments.

The next time your children have an argument and come running to you, separate them and instruct them to write down everything each one said and did as though it were dialogue in a story. Then tell them to switch papers with each other. The results of their seeing both sides of the issue or discovering where their communication broke down might be instructive.

4. Review a movie.

Instead of the dreaded book report, how about writing a review for a book or movie? Read a review together to see how it’s constructed and then let your children choose a book or movie to review as if for publication in their favorite magazine or on their favorite site. They might enjoy making a video recording of their review as though they were going to post it on YouTube. Did they hate the book or movie? How about writing a warning about it to a friend?

5. Write a new episode.

Consider getting a group of your children’s friends together to write a new episode for a favorite TV show using the show’s cast of characters. This is an easy way to practice fiction-writing skills because the characters and characterization are already developed. Simply concoct new events and dialogue.

6. Write a story made of correspondence.

Authors have been writing epistolary books for years, stories comprised of letters that unfold a story. Pamela: Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson, You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner, and the clever “Marjorie Daw” by Thomas Bailey Aldrich are all written in letters, some exclusively from one character while others are in a back-and-forth exchange of letters. Kids can get a kick out of writing a short story comprised of fictional letters, e-mails, texts, or Facebook postings.

7. Write an opinion.

Children have opinions on who should take out the trash, why they should not be forced to eat tofu, why they should be allowed to go to the concert or on the camping trip, why they are mature enough to have a pet or get their driving permit, and so forth. The next time your lawyer-child approaches the bench, simply ask for a written copy of his argument, including clear reasons, for the judge (that’s you) to take under advisement.

8. Scrapbook an event.

Has your family experienced a car accident? Met someone famous? Gone on a mission trip? Lost a loved one or a family pet? Lived through a natural disaster? Worked in a fund drive for a worthy cause? These are events your children can journal, chronicle, or scrapbook (which often requires journaling passages to explain the pictures). When they are through with their project, they’ll have something concrete to remind them years later of this special time in their lives.

9. Explore your ABCs.

Create an alphabet story as a family, one that begins each sentence with the next letter in the alphabet, much like the acrostic psalms in the Bible. The first sentence begins with “A,” the next with “B,” and so on. The results can be anything from goofy to astounding.

And don’t forget . . .

Think about rewarding your kids for completing a writing activity. A trip to the ice cream shop, a week free from garden weeding, or some extra time with friends may be just the incentive your children need to help them finish a writing activity.

What are two of the most effective ways to communicate to your kids that writing can be fun and compelling?

Let them catch you writing this summer, and write with them occasionally.

Either will raise writing to the level of a legitimate activity in their eyes and will help foster a positive attitude toward it—just in time to get the textbooks out again for school.

Yours for a more vibrant writing experience,

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