A Gamified Way to Encourage Writing

Do your children enjoy writing or do they avoid it? Night Zookeeper invited us to try out their creative writing learning platform. I am impressed with their site and think you’ll love it, too. Read on to find out more about their gamified way to encourage writing. I am an affiliate for their program. That means I’ll receive a commission if you sign up using my referral link.

Night Zookeeper: A Gamified Creative Writing Community

Night Zookeeper is a gamified learning website built to encourage writing. Recommended for ages 5-12, the games are designed to work on vocabulary, spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. Night Zookeeper provides writing prompts and story creation lessons to help improve your child’s writing.

I knew my first grader, Lily, would love the Night Zookeeper experience. She enjoys writing stories on her own, but she needs encouragement to complete writing assignments at school. She often finds them too open ended.

What I didn’t expect was how much my fifth grader, Aiden, likes Night Zookeeper. He enjoys writing occasionally but only when it’s about subjects he likes. This has been a problem when school assignments are about topics that he has no interest. (I’m am definitely an advocate for giving kids choices on writing assignments especially when the goal is to assess their writing skills.)

Want to try Night Zookeeper with your child? Use this link to visit the Night Zookeeper website. They are offering you a 50% discount for signing up through my link. (You also get a 7 day free trial to see how you like it.)

How Night Zookeeper Works

After creating your child’s account, they first get to draw themselves as a zookeeper. This drawing will become their avatar for the site. Next, they’ll add the first animal to their zoo. The animal drawing will follow them through the games and challenges.

Each time an animal is created, your child will be asked questions about the animal.

The answers to questions are turned into an animal report. This becomes the first type of writing your child experiences in the platform.

Next, your child will be invited to complete challenges. These are the games that work on writing skills like vocabulary, spelling, grammar, and sentence structure.

This is the part that makes word work not feel like work at all.

The more challenges you complete, the more orbs you collect. Use the orbs to collect animals that other kids have created or use orbs to add items to your animals.

Completing challenges also levels up your animals. As they level up, they gain more skills. Use the animals to battle the Void monsters that appear on the Night Zoo map. In order to keep expanding the zoo, you must defeat the Void monsters. This is another way the website encourages writing.

More Ways to Encourage Writing

In addition to games, kids can visit the Interactive TV+ section where they can watch episodes that teach writing skills. After the lesson, they receive a challenge to use what they learned.

Along the way, tutors provide feedback for the writing. The tutors help correct mistakes and offer positive encouragement for the writing.

My kids have only been exploring Night Zookeeper for a week. There are still more features to check out like projects – join others in writing about specific topics like fan fiction or gaming tutorials – and monthly writing competitions. Or try your hand at topping the leaderboard in the games you play.

Do you need a way to encourage writing for your kids? Give Night Zookeeper a try!

Writing secret messages and secret codes is another way we love to practice writing. Be sure to check out our collection of ideas.

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