“Taking Care of Us”

The good guys of Competitive By Nature, (CBN), invited Use Love Group’s founder, Ms. Erika to bring a slice of her garden and her knowledge to their Taking Care of Us event on July 25th. The event is a series they’ve brought to the community for years now, usually full of fitness, music, and vendors. This year, they wanted to offer activities for kids and education for the new and old plant lovers in their fitness family. Enter, Use Love Gardens ready and excited to make a nice moment for us all to connect.

The plant tent featured heritage plants, odes to great ancestors like George Washington Carver, soil-building demonstration, free baby marigold and pepper plants, information about USE LOVE’S offerings, and finally a chill out corner for the kiddos. ‘Twas fun and fulfilling. :)

Snapshots from Summer Sessions

First Meeting: Author’s Purpose & Pre-writing

Third Meeting: Drafting & Editing

On our mystery walk warm up, kids wrote the beginnings of a mystery tale. It was fun to watch them pull from their own prior knowledge about the way that storytellers create the feeling of suspense and suspicion. Some kids described our mystery character as having their hands in their pocket or ducking behind objects. I encourage parents to take a look at their composition books to see what they came up with.

Speaking of composition books, we used ours to take notes about the writing process and begin drafting our stories. In the “Daily Love” newsletter, you will see an attachment for a digital tool for drafting if your child still prefers typing. Yes, it is important that we give them regular opportunities to write by hand, and I intend to create some resources for developing a handwriting practice. However, for this project, we want them to get their story ideas out and follow through the writing process to create final drafts in the form of books. So typing can be a nice outlet to keep them going versus getting frustrated with the handwriting piece.

First Meeting

A restaurant where stories are served.

Whoa, was it a joy to see everyone again and safely in person this time around! I think we can all agree that we had a great time playing and learning together.

In this first meeting, we delved into the underlying codes that create great writers, including thinking about the author’s purpose for writing in the first place and beginning to use the writing process to craft great stories.

Our outdoor classroom under the pavilion was surprisingly comfortable and definitely added some life to our lesson. We began by observing some of the creatures around us and imagining what a fantasy day would be like for them. The kids turned into quite the interesting little dragonflies as they wrote a Warm Up journal entry in the creature’s voice. Next, we looked at three reasons why authors write (Author’s Purpose), namely to entertain, to educate or inform, and to convince or persuade. We put that knowledge to practice with our First Activity. Since the kids all enjoy Chik-fil-A, I split the group into two. Half of the kids wrote to educate, teaching their reader how to make a chicken sandwich. The other half wrote to persuade, taking on the voice of the cows who try to convince you to eat more chicken instead of beef. In our Post Activity Discussion, the kids noticed the differences in style and tone between the two groups. Those who were educating had a simple, clear, and straightforward tone. They tended to write very neatly and in steps so that people could understand their instructions. Those who were seeking to convince us had a stronger, more demanding tone. They used humor and warnings to make their point and try to change our minds. Our Second Activity got us into the writing process. First we did a quick overview of the writing process - Prewriting, Drafting, Editing, Revising, Publishing. We used our classroom space story to notice how long and confusing a story can get if we don’t take the time to plan it first. The kids used the organizer tool included on the Members Page (www.uselove.org/members, password: ‘writingrocks’) to plan out their own version of our space story. Finally, we previewed how we will fold and make physical books for the final step of the writing process, the publishing step.

Much more to come!