How Writing Prompts Help Us Tackle the Fear of Blank Paper & Writing

Writing prompts can be a great way to tackle the fear of writing and add variety to your homeschool writing.

“It’s a sheet of paper; just write!” I wanted to scream.

I’d look around the room and see classmates staring at the paper, out the window, at the blackboard.  

I’ve never met a blank sheet of paper that I couldn’t fill with words. When I was in school, in my immaturity, I thought hesitant writers were just lazy.  

And, then, a scene played out in my homeschool.   With a scrunched-up face and a flushed face, I’d recall those judgments I made decades ago. Because now MY kiddos were staring at a blank piece of paper. Or any place but the paper.

And it wasn’t because they were lazy.  

I learned that some kids need far more scaffolding than I did. They need a sentence starter or a (short!) time limit. Maybe they need to type instead of handwriting. Perhaps they need to know that grammar and spelling aren’t important or the tools (like Grammarly) to help them fix their errors.  

Tackling the Fear of Emptiness

This is where writing prompts have helped my boys not fear the sheet of paper. (Don’t Forget to Write! has been instrumental, too.)  We use them at least once a week. We do them several times a week while in the midst of one of our themed morning baskets. But what does a daily writing prompt session look like?    

“Five minutes, GO!”  

I give the prompt, let them read it, and maybe toss a few ideas out. IMPORTANT:  I provide a bit of thinking time before the timer begins. The goal is that their fingers are moving as much of these five minutes as possible. They can run Grammarly afterward if they want.

On Friday, after they’ve had at least a day to think, they select one piece to build upon. I set another time for 10-15 minutes, and they work through their checklist. While I don’t expect them to cover every item on their list, just having a list provides a concrete way to improve their writing. Their list includes:

• Rewrite your opening sentence.
• Rewrite your closing sentence.
• Choose two verbs that can be more specific.
• Choose two nouns & add a(nother) adjective.
• After an ending punctuation mark, is the next letter capitalized?
• Run Grammarly

The goal isn’t necessarily to create a LONGER piece; it’s to produce a BETTER piece.  

“Five minutes, GO!” x 5  Rather than improving one on Friday, we just do five minutes daily. If each one is full of errors & incomplete sentences, so be it. The goal of this approach is just to end up with a not-so-blank sheet of paper.  

3 Servings of Popcorn

This collaborative approach is new for us.   I create a shared Google Doc and enter the prompt. For five minutes each, we’ll take turns building on each other’s story. We find 1-2 rounds of this is great for non-fiction writing, but 2-3 rounds are best when we’re writing a story.  

One benefit of this approach is the modeling you can do when it’s your turn. I try to vary the sentence structure, add direct quotations, use specific verbs, etc… Since it is a group effort, it can force students to think on the fly even more because the story may take a very different turn than they expected!

Go Longer

When I want to focus on endurance, I set the timer for 15-20 minutes and encourage their fingers to move for at least half of that time. (Fiction pieces are the easiest type of long writing for my boys.)

As we moved to longer writing times, we had to spend a lot of time brainstorming before they began. I wanted them to feel successful from the first time we did a long writing assignment, so they’d carry that confidence into the next writing, and the next, and the next.

Go Digital with Write Bytes

Recently, we’ve gone digital. Write Bytes are interactive .pdfs I created so my kiddos could complete their writing prompts independently — right inside the .pdf. No printing, no planning.

Created around a theme (like Earth Day, pirates, and fictional stories), each Write Byte pack has 15 writing prompts. That’s enough to do them a few times a week over the course of a month without interrupting your usual writing program.

When a new month arrives, I e-mail each of them the file for the new set of prompts. From inside their email, they can download the file, and open it in a free .pdf reader (such as Adobe or FoxIt). At the end of the month, we reverse the process and they email me their completed set of prompts.

Done & done.

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