Writing Games

So, we've been enjoying the book Games for Writing by Peggy Kaye. What a great book for teaching writing in a casual manner! I kept my library copy so long I decided it was time to get my own.

Friday we played the game called How Many Words? In this game, you have a big chart of words and after you modify a die to have a 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4 roll, you roll the die to see how many words from the chart you have to fit into one sentence. If you use the number words from the row that you are supposed to, then you get that many points. The person with the most points at the end wins.

We played all together with 2nd grade, 4th grade, and even 6th grade participating. R9 came up with some really cute stuff. I'll share her work below. She decided to string the sentences together to be a story and she gave me permission to share her work with all of you.

The kitten purred in a cute way. One horrible purplish monster went swiftly to bed.

"It is delightful to be magical," said the puppy.

The bad grasshopper replied, "You are not magical. If you were you would make me magical too."

"You are sleepy. Go wake monster and use his bed," said the puppy.

The bad grasshopper went to the monster's bed and said, "Wake up," softly.

"You will be tasty when I chew you in my teeth," said monster.

The bad grasshopper raced away. The monster raced after him. Finally, the bad grasshopper fell into the smelly, dirty water.

This is just one of the many games that Peggy Kaye has put together in her book, Games for Writing. I recommend this book to anyone who has a reluctant writer (she has lots of ideas for this) or to anyone who wants to see more fruitful writing from their students.

If you visit Peggy Kaye's Website, she has some games on there to download for free. I sure hope she gets more going on there too because it would be fun to be able to share with each other how we use her stuff. After visiting there I have to say that Ms. Peggy is not a visual learner! There's not one graphic or picture on her home page. That makes me chuckle. I'm visual. Can you tell? I can't post anything without at least one picture.

Ms. Kaye's other books Games for Reading, Games for Math, and Games for Learning are also favorites of mine. These are must haves for your homeschooling shelf if you don't already have them. I borrowed mine from the library so many times, it was time to invest in my own set.