The Picture/Caption Game

Here’s a great game for all those boring travel moments. All you need is a few pieces of paper (or receipts or envelopes or old boarding passes) and a few pens, pencils, crayons, or Hello Kitty Multi Color Pens — whatever you’ve got. Adults enjoy it, kids enjoy it, pre-literate people can play too, andContinue reading “The Picture/Caption Game”

Horizontal Weasel Cookies

Here is a great exercise for breaking through our own boringness, getting exposure to the texture and beauty of foreign languages, and just practicing getting words down on paper quickly. I’ve found even some of my most reluctant writers to thrive on this one, and it’s a perennial favorite. I learned it as a poetryContinue reading “Horizontal Weasel Cookies”

Eat the Evidence

This exercise is part of a yearly Frog Hollow tradition: Spy School. Technically, I’m not supposed to tell you anything about Spy School (what Spy School?) on strict decoded orders from a mysterious character named Agent Secretface. So we’ll just say I was telling you about our Observational Writing Day. How does that sound? Anyhow,Continue reading “Eat the Evidence”

Act 2, Scene 3, Mountain Lion Sits in his Cave

We have just finished our second-ever attempt at writing plays and, while I know I’m biased, I think they came out pretty good. Playwriting with children can be a little daunting, partly because the results can be so bad: stiff, surreal, melodramatic. Yet playwriting can also be a great exercise in collaboration, storytelling, character-building, plot, humor,Continue reading “Act 2, Scene 3, Mountain Lion Sits in his Cave”