Easing Our Way Back
Brave Writer mom, Kristen, writes:
We’re easing our way back into Brave Writer, and have been enjoying [Brave Learner Home] (though I am behind again). We’re using [Building Confidence] with my 5th grade 10yo daughter, with my older son tagging along for the ride, and also reading some of the Arrow books (started with “Mr. Popper’s Penguins”). It’s been a great way to start the year gently, and the kids have been collecting words, though wondering what for.
Today we got to visit our Botanical Gardens and watch a woman extracting the honey from the bee frames. It was awesome, as she even let the kids taste the honeycomb and feel the weight of the full frames. Of course, we had to buy some honey after that!
Then we came home to re-read an old Five in a Row favorite, “The Bee Tree.” I had my kids start gluing and writing on their word tickets as I read, and when we were ready, I set out the book and the bottle of honey and let them find words that went with the story and our honey experience. We had a lot of fun with it. I was proud of the work and thankful for the gentle guidance that tied in perfectly to a field trip day for us. Thank you for the activities you create that lead to success!
You might get amused by this result from our word lists … I’m keeping a list too, as an example, and one of my favorite words is ‘dodecahedron’. (Yes, we’ll be reading “The Phantom Tollbooth” later this year!) Then we started talking about the number prefixes, and the kids loved duodecahedron (20), and I started making up other ones and having them call out what object it would fit.
My daughter was very thoughtful. “You can’t really have a tetrahedron,” she said. Then I reminded her that her dad has one … and has them all the way up to duodecahedrons. (He’s a gamer.) It took her a minute, but she finally realized that his 4-sided die was the tetrahedron … and now we’ve been driving Dad nuts by talking about rolling a duodecahedron for a critical hit! (He knows what they are, but he prefers the gamer talk of d20 or d4 and so on.) Love word play around here!
The colorful paper is just bright index cards, cut to fit the words. (We’re still copying all the words from our written lists, but I thought the magazine words would help them ‘see’ the fun of the word play best for the first go-around.)
Thanks for being such a great support!
Kristen
