7 Fun Writing Games for Middle School Kids

Writing doesn’t have to be a boring practice for kids; there are various ways to get little ones to embrace this important craft. One of such ways is through fun games that help harness kids writing potential. If you’re trying to get kids in middle school to hone their writing skills, then there are quite a lot of fun games you can use to do so.




To ensure that these writing activities go smoothly, you must endeavor to strike a balance between learning and fun.

Here are 7 cool writing games for middle school kids you can try:

1. Mad Libs

Nothing blends more perfectly with writing like humor. Both art forms just seem to perfectly co-exist with one another. Obviously, you don’t expect middle school kids to be writing humorous content like writers of The Onion, but you can help build-up their hilarious side with the use of mad libs.




The game works by crafting funny sentences with a few empty fields and making a list of words to fill those fields. Often times, the addition of the omitted words usually make the sentences sound absurd and hilarious.

Mad libs won’t only help improve the kids’ writing skills, it will also boost their sense of humor.

2. Pass-Back Story Writing Game

This writing game is pretty cool and can be used to teach children in middle school. All you have to do to set the game in motion is to write the story starter (one sentence) on the board and have every child put that in a paper.

The children then continue the story from your starting sentence but only for 2 minutes. After 2 minutes, each student passes the paper to the kid behind and he or she continues from where the previous kid stopped.

The process continues until each kid is in possession of the original story. This game is pretty cool and teaches kids to be creative and spontaneous at the same time.

3. Story Mapping

You can help kids write better stories by giving them visual footprints of what their stories should look like. Unlike adults, kids aren’t yet able to translate the creations in their minds into coherent words.




By providing them with an illustrative representation of their stories, they can easily transform it into valid words that can actually be read and understood.

4. Story Quiz

Quizzes don’t always have to be test-like questions that kids dread. You can make them fun and very entertaining. By mixing it up with cool puzzles, you can expand the imagination of the kids and help them improve their creativity. This will definitely lead to an improvement in their writing prowess.

You should, however, be careful when conducting story quizzes as they can become boring if they aren’t handled properly.

5. Guess-Who Cards

Yep, that popular game that is regularly played by adults can also be modified for middle school kids. For it to work with kids though, you may have to provide pictures of the characters to be described.




This game helps the kids to improve their descriptive writing skills since they have to accurately describe visible traits of characters to their respective game partners.

6. Write Sprints

There is probably nothing more fun than having kids write purposefully as fast as they can to see who finishes first. The point of this game is to help the kids improve their writing speed. Another benefit of having the kids engage in this writing exercise is that it helps them to speed-up the process of transferring their ideas into written words.

You should understand, though, since this is a game that evaluates speed, grammatical accuracy may not be a priority. That doesn’t mean anyone who finishes the task first is the winner. You should set a rule for the number of grammatical errors that are tolerable in the game.

7. Comic Strip Dialogue Game

There are only a few writing games for middle school kids that incorporate writing and visual art, and this is certainly one of them. This game simply makes use of a comic strip with empty dialogue boxes. All the kids have to do is fill the dialogue boxes accurately based on their understanding of the visual parts of the story.

The kid whose dialogue aptly represents the comic strip wins the game.