Personalized Writing Jar: Clever Creative Writing Prompts for Kids

In today’s post regular contributor, Jodie of Growing Book by Book, shares a clever idea for creating a jar full of engaging creative writing prompts for kids.

Are you looking for some fresh ideas to encourage your child to write? One of the easiest ways to get kids to write is to let them write about things that they love and that really interest them.

Sometimes kids have a hard time finding that topic they love to write about though.  Enter the personalized writing prompt jar!

Each jar is tailored to each child and fun to make.

You will need:

• a clean and clear plastic or glass jar (pickle, jelly or salsa jars work well)
• light colored construction paper
• markers
• pictures, magazines and stickers
• scissors
• craft sticks

To make:

1. Cut a piece of light colored construction paper to fit around the jar.

2. Have your child fill one side of the paper with pictures and words of things that he or she loves.  Use stickers and words and pictures from magazines if your child doesn’t want to draw.

3.  Roll the paper and slide it into the jar with the decorated side facing out against the glass.

4. On each craft stick write a genre of writing.  Here’s a list of ideas to get you started:

• Poem
• Greeting card
• Blog post
• Personal or business letter
• Newspaper article
• Picture book
• Speech
• Journal entry
• Magazine article
• Song lyric
• Recipe, PowerPoint presentation
• Brochure
• Obituary

5.  Place all the genre sticks inside the jar with the names pointing into the jar.

Ready to write:

Have your child close their eyes and pick up the jar.  Open eyes and check what is under his or her thumb. This is the topic he or she will write about for this activity.

Then, have your child pull one of the craft sticks to see in which genre he or she will be writing. So, if your child’s thumb was on top of a frog and he pulled song lyric as his genre, then he would write a song about a frog.

Maybe your child’s finger landed on the words “my birthday” and she pulled the recipe genre stick.  She could write a recipe for her dream birthday cake.

There are enough writing prompts here to keep them writing for months!

For more writing activities check out these related posts;

How do you like to motivate your kids to write?