Month: September 2007

Can’t help it, I’m going to rave about Peggy Kaye’s book again: Games for Writing. I’ve gushed about it at Writer…Interrupted and here at Home-steeped Hope in the past, and yes, here I go again…

What fun we had around the kitchen table this morning, with both girls giggling and saying they absolutely loved this creative writing activity! If you have Peggy’s book, we did the activity on page 107: Mixed Up and Missing, and also the activity on page 113: Strange Sentences.

Mixed Up and Missing

Give everyone their own pencil, paper and scissors. Yes, even you mom/dad. Tell them to compose a silly sentence such as this one:

“My dad bakes cherry popovers in a purple apron.”

(I wrote even longer more complicated ones for my 9 year old…she’s always up for a challenge, and gave me back as good as she got…)

Tell them their sentence is a BIG secret from the other players!

Then each writer cuts out their sentence and snips between each word, creating a “sentence puzzle” for the others to put together. FUN! Especially as so many of the adjectives can be switched, resulting in really hilarious sentences…

Strange Sentences

This game teaches the four W’s of writing a sentence: Who, What, When and Where.

Make five columns on a sheet of paper and label them as follows:

WHO or What/DID WHAT/WHERE/WHEN/PUNCTUATION

Then you and the kids brainstorm six sentences, marking them as 1-6. For example:

1. My grandpa read a book on the couch yesterday.
2. A dinosaur lived in a cave thousands of years ago.
3. My sister hid in a closet today.
4. A dog chased a cat in the pool last night.
5. My mom sang a song at church last Sunday.
6. The soldier snacked on cheetos in the tank at midnight.

Player number 1 rolls the die and it lands on 2. So your subject is the WHO or What of the second sentence: “A dinosaur”.

Player number 2 rolls the die and it lands on 1. So your DID WHAT is: “read a book”.

Player number 3 rolls the die and it lands on 4, so your WHERE is: “in the pool”.

Player number 4 rolls the die, getting a 6: “at midnight” for WHEN.

“A dinosaur read a book in the pool at midnight.”

And so on. Good for many giggles, believe me. My toddler even had fun rolling the die and hearing the silly sentences.

Best of all, it really gets the kids’ thinking creatively and makes writing…fun!

I’m all for that!

” Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
— William Butler Yeats

“I am much afraid that schools will prove to be great gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not increasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt.” –Martin Luther

” I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas. ”
–Agatha Christie

” To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. ”
— Wendy Priesnitz

“Teaching does not make learning — organized education operates on the assumption that children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them. This is not true. It is very close to 100% false. Learners make learning.”
— Education Reformer John Holt

” What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child. ”
— George Bernard Shaw

” I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. ”
— Albert Einstein

” It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. ”
— Albert Einstein

” Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. ”
— Roger Lewin

” When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.”
–Bertrand Russell

“To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.” –Theodore Roosevelt