I want to share one activity we did at Wednesday night’s Mother Daughter Book Club meeting that is worth remembering and thinking about some more. This month, we read the book The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond by Brenda Woods. In my opinion, the character who grows the most in this […]
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 […]
Lucha Libros: Bunnicula
Published on :Kids came to Central Library’s Donald Wright Auditorium tonight to do battle in Pasadena’s own Lucha Libros reading competition, answering questions about the book Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe. They did a wonderful job answering questions about the plot and characters, and a high number of kids got 100% […]
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, […]
Curiosity Machine: Magnet Structures!
Published on :Everybody knows magnets are FUN, but did you know scientists use magnets when making certain kinds of polymers? Did you know that magnets can help chemists to sort out the tangled mess of molecules that most polymers consist of? Today’s Curiosity Machine class focused on Making a Self-Assembling Structure […]
Mother Daughter Book Club: The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
Published on :This month our Mother Daughter Book Club read The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi. We met tonight to discuss Charlotte’s persecution and trial, and the many claims made by men throughout the book that she is an “unnatural” woman for having picked up sailing so quickly. If you […]
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 […]