I Usually Write Novels

My daughter is tracked out for three weeks from school.   She’s and I have been doing various things together during the day.   I’m in the middle of reorganizing/rearranging my craft room to make things the children can use more accessible to them.   I have a load of stuff in my craft room and while it’s organized in a way, it doesn’t have an overarching plan.  I have a collection of something like stickers, and those go together, but they’re not near the paper, scissors, markers and glue sticks that would be useful for my children (and the neighbor’s children) to use together.

I have a lot of things that I don’t want used without adult guidance.   Overall, the craft room is exciting to the children because there are so many thing in there that look fun to them.   But I don’t want them using acrylic paints or Swarovski crystals or many other things without adult supervision.

The good news is, they all know they’re not invited in without an adult, and everyone has been good to honor that rule.  But I’d like to make an area of items like construction paper, foam stickers, stamps, paper punches, embellishments, etc., that the children can come in and use without having to ask and without one of us having to go and manage them.

The organization is going well and I’m getting a lot done while at the same time doing things with my daughter.   I’ve been collecting tactile stickers and objects she can use.   For example, my daughter will go and write a story on her braille writer and then come in and ask what have that she could use for a lake, a road, cars and dogs (because that’s what’s in her current story).

I find different things and she makes an illustration of the story on a separate sheet.   She’s pretty prolific; she can write a story in less than five minutes.   She’ll come in, read it to me and then we brainstorm on how to illustrate the story tactilely.

I think she’s on story nine or ten now in only two days.   She wants to put them together into a book when she’s done.   I told her she wrote very well for a first grader after she finished her last story.   She said, “well, this one’s short.   At school they usually say I write novels.”   She’s right at that, she writes quite a lot for her age.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has a hard time disengaging from screen time.   It turns him into a big ball of angry sometimes, no matter how we try to prepare him for his screen time to be over.   He’s storming about in his room now, not coming down for dinner with Mimi and Gramps.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter loves stickers.   I’ve gotten all kinds of stickers that are puffy or dimensional so that she can feel what she’s putting on the paper.   She can cover a page and know exactly what each piece of her illustration is.