Dueling Authors - Get Your Kids Writing

I used Grammarly to grammar check this post because my English-teacher-mom gets a little embarrassed at the number of typos that show up in my posts...a dangerous side effect of writing blog posts late at night.

I know we're all looking for fun ways to keep our kids busy and learning this summer.  Last year Katie's reading teacher let us know that even though she was at the top of her class in her reading skills, her writing was not at a comparable level.  It was okay, but not what you'd expect from such an advanced reader.

We're continuing to work on her writing skills, and we've found it's a lot easier to get her to practice when she thinks it's fun and not really practice.

More Twig Books and Giveaway Winner

I just thought I'd show you all how much Little Brother loved his Twig Book when we gave it to him the next day.

He's not really up to writing stories yet, but he's really started loving practicing his letters during the last week or two...which is a great first step.

He' loved filling up the pages with whichever letters  caught is fancy.

And we have a winner of the Playful Learning Giveaway!  Congratulations to Erin who left this comment:  "following you on facebook! we love the silly book "diary of a worm"...thanks for doing the giveaway!"

You're going to love the book!

Twig Books for Early Writers from Playful Learning (& a Giveaway)

Some of you may remember that at the beginning of the summer, I had aspirations to write at least a weekly post for a Summer Writer's Camp series to get young kids writing...but life got busy and it never really got off the ground.

So you can imagine how excited I was when a copy of Playful Learning: Develop Your Child's Sense of Joy and Wonder by Mariah Bruehl showed up in my mailbox.  The whole first chapter is titled "Nurturing Young Authors" and features 7 different projects with somewhere around 14 different children's books to go along with them for inspiration.  It also has chapters about reading, math, science art, social studies, and citizenship, each with lots of projects and books for inspiration.  As far as I'm concerned, the only thing better than a fun kids' craft/learning idea is one that also goes along with an excellent children's book.  I didn't even make it through the second chapter before my hold list at the library filled up (seriously...we need to be able to put more than 25 books on hold at a time!), so you can bet we'll be doing more of the activities from this book in the coming weeks.  There are seriously so many great ideas in here.  For more information about the Playful Learning, Mariah Bruehl, and an upcoming E-course she's having, you can see her website here.

Fabric Post Cards

You've got mail!

Announcing Summer Writing Camp

I know a lot of you are out of school, but we still have the rest of the week...with our last day of school coming up on Saturday.  Yeah, you read that right...Saturday.  We had an extra snow day to make up and the district voted to have it on Saturday rather than the following Monday.

Anyway, I'm starting to think ahead to our summer and how to put the time to good use, so I thought I'd introduce:

Firecracker has been doing super awesome at reading over this past year, but they haven't done a whole lot of writing with her in kindergarten.  Hubby and I thought encouraging Firecracker to write more would keep her challenged and work some of those higher order thinking skills.  We've thought up some ideas, so that Firecracker hardly notices we're making her think, because it's so much fun, and I wanted to invite you to play along.

This isn't going to be nearly as structured as Reading Month in March was, but I'm going to commit to sharing one fun writing idea for the kindergarten...oh my goodness she's almost in 1st grade crowd each week.  Don't worry though, most of these ideas can be easily adapted to older and younger kids.  It won't necessarily be on a particular day of the week, but I'll be sure to fit one in.

You can look forward to the first Summer Writing Camp post tomorrow...

Who wants to join me?

Impromptu Caterpillar Lesson for Mom

This morning the kids got up on the early side and found a caterpillar somewhere in the house.  Firecracker was super excited because they're studying caterpillars and butterflies right now in kindergarten.

After we looked at the caterpillar for a while, and played with it...