Writing practice!

I have been looking for some new creative ways to encourage the twins to write.

They are very good with their reading skills and have picked up a lot of the basics of recognising punctuation from the more advanced books they read.
 
We talk a lot about the structure of books and have learnt about the components of what makes up a book, from the front and back cover formats to the  introduction page and indexes etc and we do a lot of dictionary work to correct spelling or find alternative words and meanings.

Their knowledge is growing but their writing skills I feel are lacking as they are very reluctant to write at the moment, I am sure this is just down to a lack of confidence as the knowledge is there, so I have been looking for some creative ways to encourage them to put pen to paper more often.

I purchased the Diary of a Wimpy Kid book for them to have a look at the format of a journal which I am hoping will encourage them to start to write their own daily journal.

I also came across a website that enables the user to send postcards across the world called postcrossing which entails sending and receiving postcards.

We have also talked about writing to their favourite person and sending them a letter, Olivia picked the Queen and Oliver picked Dr Who.

I also found some writing prompts websites that are very useful when they decide they do not know what to write and have writers block, these are great to also give me ideas on what themes we can use whilst thinking of some creative writing ideas.

We have also played the game where one person says a word and writes it down and then the next person carries on and says a word to follow and then writes it next to the original word and so on and so forth taking turns creating a funny story.

I purchased a great board activity called Sentifix Sam at the Seaside to create sentences, the game helps the child by providing words on Multilinks and there are some great teaching ideas included.

I am looking for more great ideas that will allow the twins to write in an non-pressured way.