This year I have a personal goal to do more writing “play,” so I’m creating weekly prompts for myself and sharing online, in case you’d like to join me too. I hope you will! Teachers, you’re welcome to use these with your students. I’ll be posting these every Wednesday on my website, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Substack.1
Whenever I share my picture book A Good Deed Can Grow, I always encourage readers to sit with the book and explore Holly Hatam’s charming illustrations. I swear, every time I look through this book I notice details I hadn’t seen before—and I’ve looked through this book A LOT. An especially fun challenge for the littlest readers (okay, me too) is to look for the hearts. Holly wove them into the story on every page in some really creative and fun ways.
I was recently looking at the illustrations (again), and it occurred to me how the variety of characters would make interesting jumping off points for writing. So that’s our prompt for this week: Using the below spread from A Good Deed Can Grow, choose a character (or characters) to write about. You could write about them in the exact moment they are pictured or put them in an entirely different scene. Anything goes! Just think about one of the characters, imagine what they might be like, and let that inspiration guide you.
My Response to Writing Prompt #11
You may have noticed there wasn’t a prompt from me last week. I’ve been so proud of myself for sticking with this weekly goal so far this year and had every intention of posting, but I was traveling with my son for his spring break and I always overestimate how much I’ll be able to get done when I’m traveling. It just wasn’t in the cards for me to pull together a post and get it sent out. But my son and I had a lovely visit with my parents. He and I also spent a day in Monterey and went to the aquarium, which is where I wrote my response to last week’s prompt. The Monterey Bay Aquarium isn’t technically new to me, but it’s been ten years since I’ve been there, so the setting felt pretty fresh.
As a reminder, here’s the previous prompt:
Here is what I wrote. (I use “X” as a placeholder for a name when I don’t want to stop and think of one.)
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