Little Writing Monsters

The title of this blog post could easily be my daughter, who has been obsessively writing stories, or at least the beginnings of stories, for a good year now, often to the detriment to other things she should be doing... but I digress.

The fact is, I am actually referring to a fun little writing exercise I did today with my son.

 I've been having my son go through this book: Just Write: Creativity and Craft in Writing, Book 1, as a way to get a little writing practice in over the summer. I found it on my shelf and decided it would do the trick. Since he is actually mostly beyond the material thought-wise (one would hope so, it's 1st grade book and he is supposed to be in 5th grade), I am just skimming through it quickly with him, hitting the highlights. In a chapter about descriptions, I came upon this fun little activity:

...use this sheet to list some details about a monster that you create. Then give this list to someone so they can draw a picture of what your monster looks like. Be sure to have enough details so your partner has a clear picture in his or her mind of what your monster looks like.

I told my son if he wrote down some descriptions I would try to draw a monster. If I got the monster all wrong it would be because he didn't describe it well enough!

Here is what he wrote:

Here is what I came up with:

It wasn't exactly what he had envisioned, but he liked it anyway.

My daughter decided she wanted to do it too, so I made up a monster of my own and she produced this very adorable drawing.

 It's not exactly what I specified, but she said she couldn't do a dog snout. I love how she named it and gave it some character too.

I think I'll call that little exercise a success!

Since we are talking about writing here, I should mention that our friend, Casey, who will be providing us with some writing classes next year, has started a blog with some wonderful writing ideas. It's worth checking out.

http://trianglekidswrite.marketingresults.guru/summer-writing-kick-off/

I can personally attest that her suggestion of, Unjournaling by Cheryl Miller Thurston, is a great resource for writing prompts. I may also check out the rest of the books in the Just Write Series. Some of this stuff is pretty fun!