The best Children's Composition & Creative Writing Books: Reddit reviews

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This is as close as we're getting to him reading a book. <em>My Book About Me (By Me, Myself)</em>.

That is the kind of paper we used for practicing handwriting in Kindergarten.

It's a good start and there is plenty of room for improvement. One piece of advice I'd give is try to get your hands on some handwriting practice paper (for example). Your lower case letters go up and down in size, whereas ideally they should all be of equal height. Handwriting practice paper has a dotted line in the center, so it makes it easier to keep them all the same height. Once you master that you can go back to regular lined paper and because you've developed muscle memory now, you'll see great improvement in how all your letters are of the same size.

Good luck! With a little perseverance and plenty of practice your cursive will be the envy of your peers (as mine is with my peers 😀)

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P.S. as many have already added below, stick with fountain pens if you can. Ballpoints just make even the neatest cursive look horrible)

Start with the basics: Handwriting Practice Paper: 100 Blank Writing Pages - For Students Learning to Write Letters https://www.amazon.com/dp/1635785014/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_H9Y40D84NQAGJ35155XY

The Elian script is a beautiful variant of the pigpen cipher.

There's also David Peterson's book Create Your Own Secret Language. Ignore the 1-star reviews, they're blatantly homophobic.

What I'd recommend mostly (I've a nephew who began making languages and fantastic worlds about that age) is personal support. If you are a language inventor yourself, spend some time talking shop with her! Let her explore the wonders of writing systems and sounds and words, and you can take the role of mentor & guide.

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I would not recommend very many books and really no videos unless you yourself have vetted them. (This is of course what any good mentor of a child would do with any video!)

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Now, I gave my nephew a book on the world's historical writing systems. It's a deep book, but it's got a lot of pictures!

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But there is one book that I would recommend (and I am planning on getting it for my nephew), and that's David Peterson's Create Your Own Secret Language. I was hesitant at first, because I'm of the opinion that how to books make for cooky-cutter invented languages. But I've come to be convinced that, especially with a mentor's guidance, such a book can be useful for the young glossopoet!

Cool!

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I don't generally recommend how-to books for language invention, and am a little on the fence about this one, but you may want to look into u/Dedalvs's new book Create Your Own Secret Language.

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I'm considering getting this for one of my nephews.

My first year too and I’m fourth. We are reading this and they get their own writers notebook with unlined paper to brainstorm (these are just white paper with a color card stock as the cover). I didn’t come up with this idea, a veteran teacher has helped me so sharing with you.

https://www.amazon.com/Writers-Notebook-Unlocking-Writer-Within/dp/0380784300

Also, heart maps. When they need an idea of what to write about they can reference their heart map.

https://www.wsra.org/assets/Convention/Handouts_2013/a6%20georgia%20heard%20heart%20mapping.pdf

Granted, I teach 5th graders so take whatever I say with a grain of salt with 11th graders. This book about writer's notebooks really helped see the benefit of having one. This focuses more on having a free space to write whatever they want that can snowball into a larger idea.

I say grading or looking through them every 2 weeks or so should be good but I think checking them may be hard if they're using it for notes or planning. Perhaps having a multi subject notebook or a writers notebook and a binder for notes and such could help with all the uses you want from it?

Sorry this was a little scattered (#onemoreweekofschool) but let me know if you have any questions!

It's sort of similar to this book, but it focuses more on childhood.

http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Writers-Comedies-Tragedies-Neighbors/dp/0152480099/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1281371075&amp;sr=8-1