Cultivating a Love for Reading and Writing, part 2: Creative Writing with Kids This post contains affiliate links. You can read my full privacy policy here. This post is a continuation of my series on helping our children and students learn to love Reading and Writing. In the first post, I mentioned a few ways […] Read more…
Math With Dice Colorful dice I picked up a few big foam dice (i guess that would technically be “die”) recently, thinking we could probably use them somehow to do math with dice at home. The novelty of the size and color certainly helped make math a bit more enticing :). Read more…
Curating a Literacy-Rich Home Environment Kids can learn so much when they are surrounded by interesting, creative, and informative things. These “things” can be books, toys, digital resources — or friends, grandparents, outdoor adventures … etc. When we curate* a resource-rich home environment for our kids, creating a space where they can comfortably live, play, […] Read more…
My 4 year old son and I sat down to brainstorm some more silly words (rhyming words or alliteration phrases or just plain silly sounds) and we (ok, mostly I) came up with this story. It’s fun to get him involved in the creative writing process so he can see how to get ideas flowing onto paper, then mash them all up and jumble them back together until they fall into place and you get a silly story. 🙂 That’s our official process at the moment. Read more…
The tale of the biker man has evolved into a series of stories (The Biker Man Chronicles, perhaps?). We’ve been on a silly-story-telling spree lately, and I had fun working with these particular ones to make them into fun tongue-twister stories.
So here’s the prequel to the story of the Biker man from my last post. Read more…
Besides answering All the Questions, another fun activity we like to do on long car rides is make up silly stories. N and I got rolling (umm, no pun intended) on a pretty silly story the other day and he helped me recall it tonight so we could be authors and write our very own book. Read more…
… I suggested he put random letters on the bag or try to write words with the stickers. He wanted to write “N’s amazing rock collection” but settled for “rocks.” This simple activity spurred some great learning moments:
He sounded out the word and decided he needed the letters R O C. I asked what other letter made a “cah” sound and he remembered that K did. We talked about how English is a silly language because people a long time ago made it up by combining a lot of different rules and then they changed most of those rules, so here we are today using two letters that make the same sound to spell a simple word like Rock. He was okay with that.Â
He knew he needed to add an S but couldn’t explain why, so I reminded him that adding an S makes things plural. I’d never taught him this before, but he learned it somewhere. … Read more…
I had made no plans for the day, but it turned out the day had adventures of its own for us. One of my friends came over in the morning and she played wonderfully with the boys! They loved the attention and she helped them get a lot of wiggles out. The boys danced to their […] Read more…
