Activities for Teaching Writing to Young Learners

Silly sentences: If you’ve ever studied a language on Duolingo, you may be familiar with such logic-defying sentences as “The elephant is in the sugar on the plate.” Kids can make these kinds of sentences on their own. Make flashcards with vocabulary words (be sure to have both nouns and verbs, as well as adjectives and adverbs if relevant). Students can manipulate the cards to come up with the silliest sentences possible, as long as they maintain grammatical order. You can either provide additional cards with articles, prepositions, and other function words, or you can have students fill those in when they copy their sentences onto the board to share with the class.

Erase and replace: Write a paragraph on the board or project a text for the class to see. Students take turns replacing one word with another that fits grammatically. They can choose to maintain the logic or to change it to be humorous.

These are just a few of the ways I have found to make learning to write in a new language fun and manageable for young learners. Many of these activities would also appeal to older learners; we often assume they want to be serious when they actually want to play around with language, too!

What writing activities have you found successful with your young learners? Share your ideas in the comments below!