Activities to Encourage Writing at Home

• Turn your home into a print-rich environment by allowing your child easy access to magazines, books, maps, manuals, e-mail, cookbooks, menus, television guides, newspapers, directions, and other reading materials.
• Encourage your child to help write grocery lists, to-do lists, notes, directions, material lists, and accurate phone messages.
• Have your child start a writer's notebook to record observations, quotes, favorite words, words that need definitions, and interesting ideas to write about.
• Encourage your child to keep a daily journal to record thoughts, feelings, and happenings.  The journal doesn't have to be fancy.  A simple notebook works as well as a commercially produced journal.
• Provide interesting writing materials, such as gel pens, felt-tip pens, calligraphy pens, colored pencils, sticky notes, small note pads, fancy stationery, homemade papers, and colored papers.
• Encourage written personal correspondence (thank you notes, friendly letters, invitations) as well as business correspondence (requests, inquiries, complaints) in both hand-written and word-processed formats.
• Create a scrapbook of a vacation, a family outing, a school trip, or a school year.  Have your child write an introduction, headings, picture captions, and titles.
• Help your child find an e-mail buddy or form a writing alliance with a relative or friend.  Be sure to provide different media for communication, such as stationery, postcards, greeting cards, and colorful papers. 
• Help your child to create word games, such as completing an analogy, writing a tongue twister, or making up rhymes and riddles.  Play commercial word games such as Scrabble, Boggle, and crossword puzzles.
  
  --Scholastic Teaching Resources

• http://field.spsk12.org/pages/Field_Elementary_School