Dear Teachers and Parents,
WriteReader would like to wish all of you Happy Holidays! As a small gift, we have compiled several ideas about how you can include the excitement of the holidays into your child’s writing by using WriteReader in your classrooms and homes this season.
We hope that the following ideas will inspire you and your students/children to use WriteReader this holiday season for writing books in class or at home.
Holiday Gift Guide
What better way to illustrate your holiday wish list than by creating a book and sharing it with your friends and family?!
Here are some tips for creating your own holiday gift guide:
- Search for images of things you want for Christmas in WriteReader’s image search function and write a sentence along with it.
- As a sentence starter, you can write: ’For Christmas I want a/an ..’, and if you want to justify your choice, you can add/continue with ’… because I .’
A Holiday Story
Write a fictional holiday story and illustrate it with your own drawings or Google images.
Consider using holiday characters from popular stories (Santa Claus, the Gingerbread Man, a Snowman, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, etc.) or invent your own characters!
Here are some story starters:
- ’I looked out the window and …’
- ’One day in December .’
- ’On Christmas Eve .’
My Holiday Break
Document your holiday break by taking pictures and writing a book!
Some ideas on what you can include in your book are:
- Holiday decorations and family traditions/activities
- Holiday food and gifts
- Holiday guests or trip/travel
My Favorite Holiday Recipe
Create a small cookbook by creating your favorite holiday dish and taking pictures to document the entire process! Print out your book and give it as a gift or keep it with the family cookbooks.
Some ideas for your cookbook are:
- Include the recipe
- Take pictures to document each step in the process
- Use an existing cookbook for inspiration and help for spelling.
Here are some General Tips for Using WriteReader Effectively:
Co-authoring
Support your child/student as a ’co-author’ by listening to and approving your child’s suggestions. Ask questions about the plot in order to further develop the story as needed. As a general rule, accept your child’s own wording and structure, which allows them to take ownership of their story.
Differentiate the Learning
If the writing process is too much of a challenge, have your child tell or record the story using the record feature in WriteReader. The adult can write the story in the adult window and the child can copy the text in the child window.
Adult writing
The adult’s “translation” of the child’s text should be grammatically correct. In addition to the child experiencing correct spelling, it is also important that they visually see and learn the correct use of punctuation.
Share books
Stories are best when shared! Sharing the child’s work with friends and family will help to motivate and encourage the child to continue writing. By sharing children’s writing, they will begin to think of themselves as an author!
Have a wonderful holiday season!
The WriteReader Team