Help your kindergarten students become phenomenal writers this year with these printable writing prompts for kindergarten! I have many fun writing prompts to help simplify your lesson planning while teaching those early writing skills.
Learning to read and write is such a crucial part of Kindergarten. These skills really cannot be understated. However, it's vital to teach them in developmentally appropriate and fun ways! It's even better when you can implement a system you can set up once and use repeatedly...
In this post, I'll share with you several great writing activities you can refer to again and again. I'll also offer helpful tools to support those early writing lessons.
Before you dive in, make sure you grab this writing station! This is one of the best ways to help your students learn how to write independently.
The writing center includes a variety of simple sentences, a picture word bank for people, animals, places, food, and more, common spellings for days and numbers, and so much more.
It will save you so much time and help your young writers learn how to find (and spell) the right words themselves!
You can also share resources at this station, like writing pages, highlighters, and other writing tools you need for writing practice. It will simplify your day and help your kids become more independent at the same time. Win-win!
Benefits of Writing Prompts & Daily Practice
One of the most important things you can do at the beginning of the school year is start a daily writing routine! Whether you post fun journal prompts or want your students to do something else, build it into your day as a must-do, never-skip routine.
- Develop fine motor skills: Your students' hands are changing so much right now! They need ample opportunities to develop their fine motor skills to develop the hand strength and dominance they need in the future.
- Get into a routine: When you're used to doing something every day, those neural pathways fire automatically. It will become easier and easier over time if your students write every single day.
- Build emotional intelligence: Daily journaling and sharing allows students to learn about each other. Often, kindergarten is the first time your students meet people different from them! By sharing their writing, they can show compassion when their friends are disappointed or sad, celebrate when they're happy, and experience a full range of other feelings.
- Develop writing stamina: Although we start with the shortest, most predictable sentences at the beginning, the writing assignments can get longer as the year progresses. This is incredibly helpful when they move on to first grade!
- Build community: When your kids feel safe enough to share their thoughts and feelings around these various topics, they trust each other more deeply and know they belong. This is easily the best part!
If you're new to teaching writing, get a free copy of How to Teach Beginning Writing!
It's a great starting point that goes deep into the seven levels of sentence writing and the writing process.
It's the perfect way to understand what to look for when you see your students' first sentences and help them improve their writing step-by-step.
Fun & Creative Printable Writing Prompts for Kindergarten
Whether you need some journal topics to get the creative juices flowing or you want projects that practice reading and writing at the same time, you'll find plenty of helpful options and creative prompts here!
Free Kindergarten Writing Prompts for Journal Writing
I love incorporating a daily journaling routine! Since it becomes a habit, your kids will know to expect it every day. If you follow a specific format, they can even anticipate what they'll write about before they get to school!
These 101 kindergarten journal prompts are all focused on your little writer! They'll get to share exciting things about themselves and reveal their personalities by answering one question per day. Even reluctant writers like to share about themselves, so they love answering questions about their best friend, their favourite food, and so much more.
You can scroll through the list of free printable writing prompts or download my free Kindergarten Writing Prompt Set Slides. These daily writing prompts are completely free and customisable, so you can adjust the spelling to any dialect!
Tip: Have your students decorate their journal covers to make them feel even more special and personalised!
Weekend Recount Writing
This is one of my favourite routines! It's easy to use, customisable, and you can scaffold it to any skill level with a few simple sentence starters.
Weekend recounting is pretty straightforward. You're simply asking kids to share what they did over the weekend. However, it is so much better than just that!
First, you'll need these weekend recount slides. Once you open them up, you'll see how easily this becomes part of your routine.
There are slides with sentence stems, frequently used words, and prompts. You can also use symbols to scaffold the activity to different skill levels.
There are even resources about "magic writing," which I use for kids who are still learning to write and aren't ready to write full sentences independently.
Beginning Sentences Worksheets
When you first teach young kids to read, the words must be incredibly easy to read. You usually start with very simple, 1-2 letter words that can be decoded with almost no effort.
These beginning sentences worksheets are very simple to decode with phrases like, "I am a cat" or "Here is a bag."
The goal is for your students to first decode these simple sentences, cut them out, paste them in order, and finally write them again in their own writing.
This process works is so powerful for a few reasons.
- Decoding: Students get a chance to practice those early decoding skills, connecting the written words to oral sounds and phrases.
- Cutting: This allows them to strengthen their fine motor skills and hand muscles, which is extremely important for this age group.
- Pasting: To paste, they must attend to the individual order of the words. This means they will need to decode the sentence again, observe the punctuation and capitalisation, and ensure the words are in order.
- Writing: When they write, they practice letter formation, capitalisation, finger spacing, spelling, and more, all while developing their fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination.
These seem like simple activities, but they really support several different important kindergarten skills at once!
Plus, there are also sentence-building mats so they can craft their own sentences, and I've also created similar versions that jumble the words together for an extra challenge. These are a great way to work on those foundational reading and writing skills early on!
Decodable Sentences
These simple activities are an excellent way to help your students learn to read and write! They're similar to the activities above but in this situation, they must match the complete sentence with the image.
This means they have a purpose for reading. They have to decode the words to understand which scene matches the sentence, which can get challenging when they have other sentences to decode at the same time!
After matching the image and the sentence together, they write the sentence by hand. Like the last activity, this is a great way to get them to engage with how words are spelled, capitalised, arranged, and punctuated in sentences while also building their writing stamina.
Get your free CVC sentence mats here! If you like them, you can view the full collection here.
Decodable Sentence Mats
Another variation of decodable sentences, this activity requires students to decode the sentence, make the decodable word, then write the decodable sentence.
These are available for CVC words and CVCC CCVC words.
Level-up with The Hive
This list of printable writing prompts for Kindergarten is just the start! There are even more writing prompts, activities, and even instructional slides available in the shop to help you teach descriptive writing, informational writing, and more.
Plus, if you're really ready to transform your teaching, join The Hive to access these activities and so much more, including lesson videos by Mrs Learning Bee.
Start your free 7 day trial to The Hive here!
More Resources You'll Love
Free Printable Blank Handwriting Worksheets for Kindergarten
Kindergarten Name Writing Activities