The Bone Eater

After taking a month off, it's been hard getting my son back into the practice of writing. He did keep a travel journal during our trip, but it wasn't daily.

Before the break, we'd mostly been working on writing summaries, but now I'm finding that I need to be more creative. I looked for some prompts on the internet, but wasn't very happy with what I found. So, I decided to make up my own. Here are some of them:

Describe a Monster
Give it a name. What does it look like? Where does it live? What does it eat? What does it do? What kind of sounds does it make? Use rich adjectives. Try to start each sentence differently.

SuperPower
If you could choose any super power, what would it be? What would you do with it?

A Magical Place
Imagine a place where anything can happen. Where are you? How did you get there? What are you doing there? What do you see around you?

The World-Saving Invention
Imagine that you have invented something that saved the world by solving one of our biggest problems. How does it work? What problem does it solve?

Letter to a Bully
Think about a time when you were bullied. Write a letter to the bully. Explain your version of what happened and how you felt. Explain why you think what he or she did was wrong.

I let him write as much as he wants, and don't try to force him to "make it longer". The better the prompt I give him, the more he wants to write. I figure in enough time for discussion before writing and after reading aloud what he wrote.

Today we did "Describe a Monster". He wrote it in Spanish (his first language), but here's a rough translation:

The Bone Eater is an evil and ferocious monster who eats children wandering up the mountain. He has a son named Cuchumolongo who also eats bones. They have claws that are one meter long and two centimeters thick. They're red and their eyes are the color of fire. They have pointy ears and tails, and they can jump very high.