I have blogged before about encouraging boys to read, something which I am still trying to do and it does seem to be working as both my boys are reading well about their age level. However, following on from reading, we are going to spend the summer encouraging and nurturing the boys writing abillities.
Good writers make good readers and vice versa, but good writers also make great students. The speed and ease or children’s writing has been found to gave an impact on children’s success. Efficient writing (legible, almost effortless and quick flowing) helps ensure that children’s pencils can keep up with their thoughts.
So this summer we will be doing the following:
Sending postcards – my boys love receiving mail and postcards are a great starting point to encouraging writing. They do not need a lot of completing and are great fun to collect, write, stamp and post.
Keeping a scrapbook – We are going to keep a book and include in it all the things we do over the summer. Keep receipts, ticket stubs, print out photographs and add personal notes to it
Make our own note paper – I thing that by making our own notepaper of letterhead then I can encourage the boys to do paper work whilst I am.
Write our own Newspaper – Everyday is filled with news, but looking at what has happened over the day we can produce our own newspaper.
Signs – I am going to encourage the boys to make their own signs
Invisible Ink, we are going to attempt to make our own invisible ink for top secret message writing.
Write our own story. Each of us is going to try and write a story over the summer. We are going to plan our story, think about our characters and about where and when the story is going to take place. I am not looking for the boys to write an essay, just a few pages, but I want to make it easy for them to move on to essay writing.
Make our own comic – Both my boys love comics, I love the thought bubbles and Maxi is learning all about speech marks, so this will be a great exercise.
Message in a bottle – we live near to the coast, so we thought it would be fun to send a message in a bottle. We are also planning to send a message off with a balloon too and see if we get anything back.
