Word Party

We had a party this week to celebrate words and reading.

Sugar Snack helped me get ready while the girls were at school.

Pumpkin Gingersnap Cookies cut into "sight words" = Yum!

He can't read yet, but he knows tasty cookies.

I drew pictures of things we'd have at a party,

labeled them along with some random descriptive words,

cut them out

and put them on the table in a big bowl.

We took turns choosing from the bowl and sounding out words.

Once read, we decided where our words belonged:

food and party fare ("cup", "cookie," "bread")

decorated our plates,

descriptive words like "red" and "shiny"

fancied up our paper crowns

and a few unwanted words like "grouchy" and "tired"

ended up on noses and chairs.

After a delightful afternoon filled

with games, tea and word cookies,

the verdict was in:

"This was the best day ever! Can we have a word party every day?"

Word Therapy for Time-Crunched Writers

If writing life is a garden, mine is in winter.

I love this glorious season;

but with twins in kindergarten, a babe in arms

and a toddler in everything else

- including water and bags of pancake mix simultaneously -

available writing hours are slim to none.

Why fight it?

I'm a writer; I don't want to be a frustrated writer,

so I'm turning my daily adventures into word therapy.

It's a lot like writing, only without the pen or computer.

Some might call it "thinking,"

only it's more purposeful than that.

How do you feed your hungry inner writer and artist?

Lunch!

Read.

Read to kids, read to your partner, read to yourself. Reading is research.

Compare books, outline favorite plots, take notes on what works and doesn't work.

Play word games.

Play with rhyme, rhythm, pacing, pig latin, word patterns, alliterations, Cockney rhyming slang.

Observe. Question. Listen.

Be Sherlock Holmes, focusing on minute details in speech, expression, landscape, emotion.

Play- at kid level.

Celebrate word and art in the commonplace.

This one is so fun for me that I'll visit it in later posts.

Box City

Box Castle

Here's to getting our brain-dirt nice and loamy so that when we plunk down our story seeds, they'll shoot up into brilliant oaks of word!