One of the best ways to ensure you stick with a daily writing habit is to have plenty of prompts on hand. Kids thrive when they are given boundaries with generous margins. The twenty writing prompts in this free printable January writing prompt calendar provide the perfect amount of structure to stimulate your young writer while allowing for plenty of imagination!
Example writing prompts from the January calendar
- If you could live in a TV show, which one would it be? Why? What character would you play?
- Convince your parents to let you play a winter sport.
- Are you outgoing or shy? Write a paragraph explaining how it feels to be in a roomful of people.
- What are 3 things you like to do on Saturdays?
The calendar is not dated, so you can use it year after year whenever you need writing inspiration for your elementary students in grades 3-8.
Ideas for using your January writing prompt calendar
There is no single way to use the calendar. It’s flexible, so you can make it work for you and your children! Here are a few options.
- Print it on colored paper —maybe blue for January.
- Print it on white paper, and let your child color in the prompts as she uses them.
- Number the grid with the dates you have homeschool lessons in January.
- Let your child skip around on the grid, choosing the prompts out of order.
- Hole punch the calendar and put it into a writing notebook or journal.
- Tape or glue the calendar into a composition notebook or journal.
- Hang the calendar on your refrigerator or bulletin board for daily reference.
If you would like to share this prompt with others, please link to this post instead of linking directly to the PDF file. Feel free to save and print this PDF file for your own personal use. Please do not sell or host these files anywhere else.