Top Edu Apps and Tips for Creative Writing

Encouraging creative writing at home can be tricky for a parent, especially when children (in fact all of us!) can have a good writing day or a bad writing day and, with standards dropping in reading and writing, we always need to be on the look out for great tools to help inspire our kids!

Through sensitive teaching and plenty of practise, children develop confidence and build up their writing skills throughout their primary/elementary school career. Through a culmination of many language and text-based skills, they become proficient writers, or so we hope! There are many aspects which can help their writing progress but developments in technology have seen a huge resource potential, accelerating children’s progress in this important area of their learning.

As with developing reading skills, exposing children to a variety of texts is really important, as is the over-riding importance of writing for purpose. To that end, here are our top tips for moving children’s writing forward, as ever with a digital twist!

1. Reading and writing go hand-in-hand so giving children plenty of exposure to a wide variety of genres and styles of texts is so important and we as parents should read as much as possible with and to children of ALL ages. Audio books and book apps are great resources so use and recommend some our best book apps.

2. Writing for a purpose is key. We as adults generally write for a particular audience, and children are no different. We’re always delighted to receive letters, emails or app reviews from our young app-users…just bear that in mind. Our contact details are at the bottom of this mailer!

3. Some brilliant (adult and child) writers don’t actually physically write at all. The late Times journalist AA Gill had such severe dyslexia that he was unable to ‘write’ a word. That didn’t stop him from being a very successful ‘writer’. There are marvellous digital tools to aid and support our young writers who struggle with the physical/cognitive process of physical writing. Check out Clicker, one of the best.

4. Thinking of a story together is a great way to spark ideas of each other and kids with love going on an imaginary journey with you, or in a sibling group. Digital mind mapping tools like Mind Plan are great resources for you to record their ideas as they develop and take shape. Post it notes for words and pictures also work well!

5. Challenge your child to publish a book! Apps for making digital books are fabulous resources for children to marry text and images together and they can share amazing results with family and friends. Imagistory app is a great starting point.