If your kids are anything like mine, the end of Easter doesn’t mean they are ready to put away the eggs! I’m fairly convinced that my kids would happily hunt for Easter eggs every day of the year. I wasn’t about to re-fill our plastic eggs with more candy or treats, so I set out to create a fun and educational egg hunt.
Without much surprise, my natural bent was to make the game writing-focused. As a teacher, writing was my absolute favorite subject to teach. (Shocking, I know.) Many of today’s classrooms fail to properly teach and develop creative writers. Successful writers are more successful readers. I want my children to develop a love of writing, and have confidence in their abilities to create as a writer.
Many children find it difficult to tell a story. Some simply believe they can’t do it. (Can’t is a bad word at our house btw.) This activity allows a child to formulate a story in a non-threatening and engaging way.
1. Come up with a list of great nouns. Choose people, places, and objects that are fun, unusual, interesting, or unique. (Make sure your child will have some degree of familiarity with the words however! They will become frustrated if they find a word they don’t know or understand!) Write them on small slips of paper.
2. Place one noun paper into each egg.
3. Hide the eggs!
4. Find the eggs! (This one’s a bit blurtastic, because they were SO excited to be finding eggs again!)
5. Tell a story
Have your child tell a story that incorporates all or most of the words he/she found. Based on your child’s individual needs/level, he/she can simply verbalize the story, draw a picture of the story, or write it down.
You may need to MODEL this for your child.
There are NO wrong answers in creative writing!
If your child chooses to write their story, this is NOT the time to harp on their conventions and grammar….unless of course you’d like to kill their creativity!
With my son, I chose to have him tell the story. When he became stuck, I’d simply ask a guiding question.
Him – “Once upon a time there was a wicked queen who had a crying baby.”
Me- “Why was the baby crying?”
Him- “She missed her mom.”
Me- “Where do you think her mom was?”
I let him choose which way to go, I simply presented the different pathways.
As he told the story, I would help him repeat and retell what he had come up with, with the additional details. I also tried to introduce First, next, then, etc.
My daughter chose to write her story down. She went and RAN for the paper as soon as she opened her eggs. She was SO eager to write! As a follow-up, I may go back on another day and have her illustrate her draft, and use her illustration to begin adding details to her piece. We would then begin to work on the editing (capitalization, punctuation, spelling, etc.) AFTER all of the initial creative pieces were done.
Have fun with your budding storytellers and writers!!
