Young Readers League “What’s in a Name” Writing Contest Category 1 (Age 8-11) 2nd place
“A Legacy” by Stella Paz
Published on :Young Readers League “What’s in a Name” Writing Contest Category 1 (Age 8-11) 3rd place
Kids’ Writing Workshop 12/18/15: Fractured Fairytales
Published on :On Friday Dec. 18th, our kids’ writing workshop made up new stories involving one or more fairytale characters. Kids got to draw two names from a basket–these were names of characters from some European or American fairytale, such as Brothers Grimm fairytales or Hans Christian Andersen fairytales, and usually not from the […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop: What’s your TRUE name?
Published on :To help kids brainstorm for our Young Readers’ League writing contest, we did writing exercises from the book Leap Write In! by Karen Benke, writing poem sentences and answering writing prompts about what our name means or what an ideal name would be for us. Here is what the kids came […]
Creative Writing for Beginning Readers: Flipping Out Over Alliteration
Published on :In today’s Creative Writing for Beginning Readers workshop, we created funny flip books with very random, strange characters whose traits were based on silly alliterations. We learned that alliteration means that all of the words in a sentence or phrase begin with the same letter sound. So we had animals like […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop with author Elana Arnold
Published on :Sometimes I like to make a video mashup of clips from these workshops, especially now that we have a digital camera that will take both photo and video. So before I go into how amazing and fun and rewarding last week’s creative writing workshop with Elana K. Arnold was, why […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop: Overcoming internal censorship and silencing your inner critic
Published on :Next week happens to be Banned Books Week, held nationwide in libraries and bookstores every year on the last week of September to remind people that restricting and censoring books that you might find “offensive” actually harms people because it restricts people’s freedom to read whatever they want. All that follows is a less-informed, […]
Creative Writing for Beginning Readers: School Stories
Published on :Yesterday children between the ages of 5 and 8 got practice putting together stories using creative tools we gave them. First, we discussed a famous quote by John Le Carré: The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop: Writing Style and Voice
Published on :On Friday, our Kids’ Writing Workshop discussed the elements that give a writer his or her unique “voice.” Voice is a difficult thing to define, but we read a capable definition of it in this article by Dave Hood: Developing Your Writing Voice. Hood writes that voice is composed of […]
Creative Writing for Beginning Readers: Bookworm Books!
Published on :This month’s Creative Writing for Beginning Readers class took inspiration from the book Violet and Victor Write the Best-Ever Bookworm Book by Alice Kuipers and illustrated by Bethany Murguia. It’s a very cute book about a boy and a girl who make up a story about a bookworm who slips […]