I picked up some free calendars at the local library. They were donated by the Nintendo Corporation and had the video game characters sprinkled inbetween the months of the year. I thought I might be able to make some kind of work out of them, but my daughter beat me to it.
Although I had calendar work in mind, she found a more creative use for the artwork.
She thought it would be funny to cut out the characters and then write what they might be thinking in cartoon bubbles.
This gave me an idea for some creative writing work. I cut out those same characters from another copy of the same calendar (they had thousands, so I helped myself to a few!). I attached them and other stickers I found to index cards.
I then stacked them up and placed them in a container.
I had each child pick a card and asked them to think of something the character would say and write it on the card, like a cartoon. Since I wanted to review interjections, they were asked to use at least one interjection in their writing.
The great thing about this work is that the ideas are limitless - you can use comparative adjectives, current vocabulary/word studies, etc. You can even laminate the cards and have the kids write on them with wipe-off markers (mine have gone AWOL at this time, so I haven't gotten a chance to do this just yet).
The best thing about this work is seeing my child smile at the work when she realized that I got the idea from her - that was priceless.
As an extension and for some added fun and practice speaking aloud, we are going to choose a card when we have completed the stack and act them out and see if we can guess what character is on the card.
