This time of the homeschool year tends to be academic crunch time.

You’ve been working hard in your homeschool for the past couple of months. You’re also getting your kids out of the house for exercise and extracurriculars during the week. You know just how important it is to have a variety of activities and experiences organized for your kids.

You’re a conscientious parent.

All the same, doing your academics at the kitchen table every day can get very old and very stale, especially when it comes to writing.

Writing practice becomes a dreaded drudgery if it only consists of writing in a workbook all the time.

Don’t let that happen! Change things up with hands on activities that include strong writing practice too.

It’s easy. Keep on reading for some of the favorites I’ve used over the years.

Hands On Writing Activities You Should Use in Your Homeschool 

Hands on activities use different sorts of materials than the usual pen and paper. They exercise creativity and critical thinking, but they also include a writing component.

Given the opportunity to be creative and exercise their own choice, kids forget that they’re also doing the same hard work that their usual non-fiction writing instruction requires.

It’s fun for them and fun for you!

Try one of these activities every couple of weeks, or whenever you see attention spans waning.

1. Create a writing prompt jar. With your kids, develop 20 or so writing prompts, each one written on its own folded slip of paper. Put them all in a jar. Have your kids pull one out at random and write about it! This is a fun activity to do about once a week.

2. Journaling. This can take a variety of forms, and it’ good practice for writing in the first person. To start, your kids can journal in their own decorated notebooks about their own life.

If you’d like to make this an interdisciplinary activity, your kids can pretend to be a person from history who is writing in their journal, depending on what you’re studying. For example, they could write from the perspective of a pioneer, a Roman soldier, or a famous scientist or mathematician.

3. Annotated timeline. Your kids will be writing assorted timelines throughout their education. Some will be about events leading up to a major discovery or others that have had worldwide impact. On the other hand, a timeline can simply be about important events in your kids’ own lives. They’ll use their critical thinking skills to decide on the events to include, but then they must annotate each item: add a few sentences to explain its impact.

Make it fun! Get a roll of butcher block paper or long strips of construction paper and have your kids decorate and illustrate their annotated timelines. They could also add a photo for each item on the timeline.

4. Write an acrostic. This is a pleasant and quick creative activity to do when your kids are wrapping up a unit of study. The keyword or main subject is spelled out vertically on a page, and kids write sentences about that subject. Each sentence begins with each letter of the word that’s written out vertically.

5. Venn Diagram. One of the first critical thinking skills kids are asked to practice is to compare and contrast two things. In a Venn Diagram, this is done by writing the similarities and differences into parts of two overlapping circles. Add a dose of creativity by asking them to add illustrations, or again, move this assignment onto a large sheet of colorful paper.

6. Design an imaginary magazine or newspaper. This is a fun, longer project to do to practice journalism or newspaper style writing, and everyone in the family can participate in some manner. Different types of short articles can include sports, news, travel, and fashion.

This activity can also easily be used as an interdisciplinary project. For example, your kids could design a newspaper written from a specific time and place in history, practicing their writing skills as well as a historical period they’re currently studying.

7. Travel brochure. Kids could write, design, and illustrate a brochure to some place your family has been or would like to go someday.

8. Time capsule project. Choose any time period or civilization and ask your kids to pick the most important innovations in science, math, art, literature, and so on to include in the time capsule. Naturally, written explanations as to why each item was chosen would be required.

9. Sensory figures. Pick a person in history, like a pioneer, a knight, a queen, etc. Draw an illustrated, detailed figure of that person in the middle of the page, and add a title across the top sharing who the figure is. Surrounding the figure, in cartoon bubbles, write I-statements in complete sentences. The I-statements begin with “I see,” “I want,” “I smell,” “I think,” and so on. All of the I-statements relate to that specific figure’s unique experience.

10. Write and design an advertisement. This would be an excellent way to practice persuasive writing on any subject.

A Final Note 

Before you start any of these activities, take a few minutes to develop a checklist (also known as a scoring tool) of what you’d like to see in the finished product. How many sentences? How much and what kind of information should it contain? How many illustrations?

If any of these activities are already in your purchased curricula, simply move them out of the workbook and onto a larger scale and use crayons or markers of their choice instead of pencil and paper.

Think in terms of zhushing them up!

Some of your technologically advanced kids may want to design their activity on an online application. This is perfectly fine as long as they meet the writing requirements you assign.

All of the above said, please be reminded that these activities are to complement and serve as enrichment to the foundational teachings of your main curriculum, as well as to offer an opportunity for greater creativity and a change of pace.

 Lily Iatridis is the founder of Writing Rockstars, an online writing program that prepares teens for college level writing.