Encourage children to connect words and pictures by having them write their own captions for family or magazine photos.

Kids will love Hink Pinks—word puzzles that use two-word clues to lead to a rhyming solution. Try one and get hooked yourself: Obese feline? Fat cat!

Children learn how to make a convincing argument—an important skill in school and in life.

Writing stories that imitate a certain genre or type of fiction allows children to explore a book they love by imagining new twists for their favorite characters and plot lines.

In this activity, children look closely at living things in their natural environments and then make books about what they see.

Let children explore an interesting subject—themselves. An online tool will teach them to summarize and organize information as they write.

Use shape and theme poems, or poems that look like the things they describe, as a fun way to introduce children to poetry.

Use recipes to help children practice reading and writing step-by-step instructions. Have them sample the results to see how they did.

Use the online Trading Card Creator tool to have children make cards describing their favorite characters from the books on their reading list.

Share a fun book about staying safe and then talk about real-life safety issues before writing a letter to someone in your community who can help.

Boost vocabulary by taking an imaginary trip into space. After a lunar "landing," children return to Earth with a galaxy of new words.

Choose favorite rhyming songs or nursery rhymes then replace the rhyming words with seasonal themes.

Find three fun online games that are designed to help children learn to recognize letters and how they sound.

Engage teens in this activity in which they use photographs to examine and write about courage on a blog.

Invite teens to explore issues that are important to them, and then write a script and film a video public service announcement.

In this activity teens are encouraged to explore their reading history as they remember books they liked reading as children and then revisit these old favorites.

Explore how music can have an emotional impact on a scene in a movie, then help teens write and film a scene of their own.

Encourage children to spend a little time thinking and writing about just what makes a hero and who their personal heroes might be.

This activity invites children and teens to explore various careers and then write about what they might want to be when they grow up in a blog.

Let children practice using different types of words in a fill-in-the-blank-story game before making their own word list for a magnetic poetry set.