Read good books, write in your journal, make a family newsletter, do family writing activities together (see the link for lap books above). Two of my favorite activities have been writing Who, What, When, Where, Why stories. Let me explain what I mean. You each have a piece of paper folded into fifths. Fold the top back away from you about a fifth of the way down and keep going until you have five sections (four folds). Write the word 'who' in the top left corner of the first section, 'what' in the second and so on.
Now each person writes someone's name (or two names as long as everyone does it) in the first or 'who? section, folds it down so the others can't see and passes it to the right. On the next section you write what? that person (or those people) did.
Example, flew on the top of a giant seagull or peeled onions until they cried. The next section is 'when?',did they do it in the summer? On Christmas Day?  'Where?' in the apple orchard or in  a dirty bathtub? 'Why?' because it was hot out? Because the leaves were turning? We've had some pretty funny little stories come out. Older kids can elaborate and make paragraphs instead of small sentences. So, for example, they might write in the section that asks "Who?" A young girl, with ragged clothes and a scruffy mongrel dog at her side. A girl who had almost nothing but that mangey pet to call her own and lived in a house made of cardboard in a cold alley... Or, Mr Higgins, the man with the pot belly who seemed to float mysteriously through the aisles as if he was a ghost...I think you could adapt this activity.
When one of my sons was younger I used to get him to write by sending him airmail. I
made a big paper airplane and flew it to him with a message on it (a question). He would unfold it, read the message, write a response and fly it back. I thought that was one of my better ideas. Now I think, though, that I made too big of a deal over writing daily. I
have learned a little about writing by reading over some of Charlotte Mason's ideas-one of which is narration. Basically, read good literature so that they hear how good writing sounds. Have them narrate back to you what was read, orally first, and then in written form as they're ready for it. I've also learned that we write the way we talk, or writing is talk on paper. If you speak well, you can write well. Write with your kids and then share what you've written with each other, or as we did for a time, we sent out a newsletter to distant family once a month or once a quarter. Here's a sample of an old one we sent out. If you read good literature you'll speak better. So, they're all tied together.
I was browsing the Write-Guide site and found this free letter writing program. There are eight lessons: imagery, internal dialogue, similes and metaphors, flashbacks, symbolism, parallel structure,; personification, word choice. We're going to do it with our cousins in another state so we can get to know them better. Update. My kids liked writing to the cousins but DID NOT enjoy having to do it as a lesson requirement. I would suggest just letting them write to the cousins. They were all glad to stop the lessons though I have a nice record of their correspondence now:) When my oldest daughter was homeschooling, she and her cousin started writing letters as if they were living during the civil war,or maybe it was the War of Independence. I wish I still had all of them. They had a lot of fun and they came up with the idea all on their own. Sometimes we just get in the way of their learning when we freak out about whether their learning what they're "supposed" to be learning. Be careful.


 Since I don't trust my own grammar skills, we use Editor in Chief books.  They're available in many homeschool catalogs and they also have a site of their own (might be cheaper through the other catalogs though). Recently, actually today, I had two of the boys find an interesting paragraph in a book. They typed them up on the computer making sure to get all of the punctuation etc. correct. Then they made 7 mistakes in the paragraph to give to the other one to edit. They had a lot of fun and I think we'll do it again. We're waiting for the next level of Editor inChief to come in-maybe we should just make up our own all of the time! We've also used Grammar Songs and Writing Power as resources. Writing Power is a very thick book with LOTS of information. It covers every aspect of language arts and includes lots of fun learning activities. It is a lot of work to go through but has some very valuable infomation. Like Spelling Power, below, I don't use it all because it overwhelms me. What I have done though, has been really good and it covers K-12 so that you would never have to use anything else with your kids. (except, maybe, spelling power :) ) It's a great resource. You would need to decide if it was worth it to you or not. If I was a mom with tiny kids who wanted to prepare before really starting to teach them language arts skills I would study this book first. I've never purchased the separate activity task cards which might make it easier to use.  My kids always loved, and still enjoy, Madlibs.  Last year my youngest, who was eight, wrote a lot of his own (another fun project). If you use Madlibs or something similar , your kids will learn verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives easily. A good book for studying grammar, in my opinion, is Commas Are Our Friends by Joe Devine. It is a book of novellas dedicated to teaching the parts of speech, punctuation, etc. It's educational and entertaining too. We read it aloud together and then try to remember what we learned. If we don't get it all now we can always read it again!

     For spelling, I use Spelling Power.  It works great for my kids, who were once terrible spellers. The book is full of spelling lists headed by spelling rules. There is a lot of review so that they get a chance to keep their skills up. First, they take a test to see which level they should start on. The method of testing is different than we're used to. You set the timer for 5 minutes. Give your child the first word. If they get it right you go to the next word, if they don't you have them cross it out right then and rewrite it correctly. They are given as much time as they need to figure a word out as they spell. When the timer goes off, you stop. If they spelled 10 words, great. If they only fit in 5, that's okay too. They only study the words they missed, with a 10 step study list. They will soon be able to memorize the steps and do it quickly on their own. There are plenty of forms, games and other activities, in the book if you need them. We do a lot of spelling bees instead of tests. Sometimes we do it on the trampoline with sidewalk chalk. If they get the word correct without any clues they get to do a trick when they're done after they bounce and spell it out loud. Sometimes I give them candies, one for no clues and two if they got it all on their own. I found that my kids did fine without all of the extras in the book ; so I really just use the lists and the study steps. There are some good ideas for writing also-these are found in Writing Power too. If you're considering using Writing Power I'd see if what they have on writing in the Spelling Power book is sufficient first. You can use Spelling Power for all of your kids until they reach 12th grade if you need to so it is worth the cost to me. I love Spelling Power.

     Handwriting has never been a popular subject at my house. I think I'll link you to some other sources for that one. Mainly there is the italic, d'nealian, and the ball and stick methods. It doesn't matter the style, my boys don't like any of it. They appear to have come out okay anyway.
They don't really use cursive but, if they really want to, I'm sure they're capable of learning it. They can read cursive and that's good. They can also peck at the typewriter in one form or another. It's okay with me as long as they're legible. I turn you again to Penny Gardner for learning italic.  I just found Handwriting for Kids for the standard manuscript and cursive. It's kind of cool because it's animated-point to the letter and it writes itself! It might be fun! Woah! Talk about handwriting! Check this out!  I never realized there were so many sites devoted to handwriting. Maybe this will get my uninterested kids to pay more attention to the art.
Another way that we've done handwriting is by using copywork. My boys had a composition book, you could use the paper with the guide lines. I just used two lines when they were younger and used the line in the middle for the midline for lower case letters. I would print or write in cursive, depending on their level, a verse or quote of some kind on every other line, leaving space for them to copy below. One of my sons liked stickers when he was done and we put them all over the cover of the book. I eventually would write one word in cursive below the quote, one letter per line and then the whole word. Some people skip printing and go right to cursive when they teach handwriting. On the page facing the quote I would write a message to my son so that he could practice reading cursive. An example would be: I otter get an otter pop. If you can understand this, come and tell me what it says and I will give you an otter pop. Another one was, If you can read this run upstairs and yell like Tarzan. If I heard him upstairs yelling, I knew he understood what I had written.
I just recalled a clever trick we learned when my older son was having trouble telling a b from a d. Use the word bed as a mnemonic device. The word bed looks like a bed. If you read it from left to right you will see that the first sound in bed is /b/ and that is the letter b. The last sound in bed is /d/ and is the letter d. If they can remember how to spell and visualize the word bed they can remember which is b and which is d. (Hopefully :).