If you have a young writer in the house, you have a ripe opportunity to leverage that into a skill that will serve them well their entire life. Next to being able to read, kids who enjoy writing will likely have a better chance at a successful future.

As parents, it's our job to build on that passion and nurture it, providing rich opportunities for more writing experiences. Schools focus on a formula for writing, but the heart and mind of a writer needs to know more than that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

There are several strategies you can use to exercise those creative writing skills in kids:

Writing software for kids can guide children through the details of creating unique characters for stories, help them describe time and place in a story, and track their writing progress, whether they be writing something short and sweet or long and fascinating.

Find writing contests for kids that allow them to practice working with words and experience the accomplishment that comes with seeing their work posted online or in magazines.

Use writing games for kids and have those little brains spinning to find new ways to describe the same old things.

Take your kids on an outing with the specific objective of writing about the experience at the end of the trip.

It doesn't take a lot of time for kids who love writing to see that there's a whole world to write about. It does, however, take a little planning, encouragement and the right tools on our part. As the mother of a child who hates to write, I spent months finding ways to turn him around. When he asked me the other day for a pen and a piece of paper in the middle of the grocery store so he could make some notes about some ideas for a book he's writing using his software program, I nearly fainted. On the outside, I simply smiled and handed him a pen and paper. Inside, I screamed with pride. Yes!