writing

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hello! How are you? Are you hustling and bustling this week, or having some downtime? We are lucky enough to be taking the downtime route, along with a sprinkling of tidying, project-making, and wish-list writing. Tomorrow, we get to share a delicious meal and visit with family and the girls are quite excited for the [...]

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Edible Cells & Poetry Journals

Edible Plant and Animal Cells Activity The hands-down highlight of this week’s learning activities was the creating (and eating!) of edible animal and plant cells. I saw this project at Se7en’s blog, and knew the girls would love it. Using jello as our cytoplasm, we added various fruits and candies to represent some of the [...]

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All About Me Wordle for Kids

The girls and I love starting the school year with new photos, a self-portrait project, and an interview. This year, we had fun making All About Me word clouds using Wordle. We’re totally hooked on Wordle now! Check out our finished Wordles and tips at Make and Takes today – see you there!

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Secret Codes for Mini-Detectives

Happy mid-July! How’s your summer treating you so far? We’re getting ready for Delaney’s 8th birthday this coming weekend – she’s having a 50 states party! As I’ve mentioned before, my girls are on a secret agent/detective/super spy kick. (Remember the homemade detective kits from Christmas?) Every good detective needs a way to send secret [...]

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Gadanke Journal Review

We have been playing with a really fun kid’s journal from the Gadanke handmade journal shop. I have always written in some sort of journal or notebook, not to mention all the notes I have jotted down about things the girls say or special memories. My girls are also showing an interest in journaling and [...]

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First Paragraph Writing

For the past few months, Natalie (age eight) has been working on basic paragraph writing. She writes an introductory sentence, three details, and a concluding sentence. She seems to like structured writing assignments like this, and choosing a topic is her favorite part. Step 1: Planning After choosing a topic, Natalie creates a web with [...]

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Journal Starters

Journal writing is always a part of our weekly activities. The girls usually write in their journals twice a week, sometimes more. I love looking back at their journals (we start a new one each season) and rereading the daily events that were important to them at the time. Of course, the journals are also [...]

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Sequence Writing: How To…

We do lots of writing activities around our house – structured and spontaneous. And by writing, I mean “getting our thoughts down on paper.” Drawings, scribbles, captions, lists, invented spelling, copying words, creating books – it all counts! The teacher part of my brain loves to expose the girls to different ways to structure our [...]

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The Anderson Courier

The first edition of The Anderson Courier is just hitting the newsstand, courtesy of our very own news reporter, Natalie! Natalie has been hard at work writing and illustrating her first newspaper with articles, interviews, jokes, movie review, recipe, and more. After reading Some Good News (the 4th book in the Cobble Street Cousins series [...]

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