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Happy Earth Day! We love to use our recycling for creative projects, how about you? Today we made a color sort and poems using old magazines. 1. Get your magazines out of your art / recycling box. 2. Cut out words and phrases. 3. OLDER CHILDREN: Play with the words to make poems. 5. YOUNGER [...]

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Anyone else have a child in their life who doesn’t like to write? Whether you do or don’t, as parents, we always need ideas to get all our kids motivation and opportunity for writing – not just our unmotivated kiddos. Let Your Kids Write Blogs Before you freak out and stop reading, let me tell [...]

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Guest Post by: Alida Bunder, ECE specialist, mom, grandma, and literacy expert. Making story rolls with paper towel rolls is a happy writing activity that gets children excited about creating books. By using both hands and heads, children will invent something that is uniquely his or her own. Materials: one or two empty rolls from [...]

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I’m always looking for ways to get my kids outside to get in their 60 minutes a day, also known as a “Green Hour” by the National Wildlife Federation. Last week, I let each kid use a digital camera to photograph signs of spring and get them walking outside and noticing nature. (6 year old, JJ, [...]

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Guest post by Dawn Little, author, mom and blogger atPicture This! Teaching with Picture Books,Literacy Toolbox and Links to literacy.com.   We often forget that reading and writing go hand in hand. If we want our children to be better readers, they need to write more. Conversely, if we want our children to be better [...]

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Play with words and kids will love them. Sneeze + Cough = a Snoff? Is a cough- sneeze a snoff or a cougeeze? If there’s not a word for something, why not invent one? And, why not entice your reluctant writers with such fun word play? Word play in children starts early – we rhyme, [...]

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You know Lemony Snicket (aka. Daniel Handler) from his Series of Unfortunate Events. And, if you’ve read that series, you’ll be amply prepared for his new, zany picture book, 13 Words, with painted illustrations from the fabulous, Maira Kalman. Imagine for a minute that you come upon thirteen words – any old thirteen. And then you [...]

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I believe in teaching kids good manners, writing thank you notes is one of them. That’s why, before we put away our new Christmas gifts, I have the kids write thank you notes. What if they’re too young? No problem. 0 – 5 YEARS: I take a photo of the girls holding up the present, [...]

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I panicked my daughter this morning when I told her I was doing a giveaway of StoryPlay Cards. “NO – I love those!” We both do. Not to fear, daughter, the winner will get a brand new set cards, not our review set which my friend, Randy Compton in Boulder, Colorado sent me to review. [...]

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Guest writing game post”Create Your Own Familiar” by Adam Jay Epstein and Andrew Jacobson, authors of the popular new middle fiction book, The Familiars. Do you have pets? Do you ever wonder if they possess magical powers? Or, if you don’t have any pets (like Adam), do you ever imagine that you have a magical [...]

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Guest post by Natasha Wing, author of picture book, How to Raise a Dinosaur. A question writers are often asked is, “How do you get your ideas?” Many of my ideas come from reading. Sometimes I’ll read an article in the newspaper and am curious to know more. That’s what happened when I read about [...]

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Guest post by Bob Raczka, poet and author of Guyku, A Year of Haiku for Boys. Haiku poems are short. They are also fun to write. But writing a good haiku is not as easy as it looks. It takes practice. Here are some tips: 1. The form of a haiku is very simple: – [...]