Make Comics with LEGO Hero Factory

You've probably picked up by now that I love LEGO. I truly do. I told you about the ComicBuilder from the LEGO City website in LEGO Literacy. I wrote about ways to link LEGO building and literacy in LEGO and Literacy (1), and LEGO and Literacy (2). And more recently, I wrote about Pharaoh's Quest, another LEGO online place for creating with LEGO.

Building with blocks is great for creative and critical thinking. Any catalogues with LEGO sets in them make great reading and discussion material at home or in the classroom. Reading directions for how to assemble LEGO sets is excellent for functional literacy. Using LEGO comic builders as a prompt for story writing is not only educational, it's great fun!

So why not try out this LEGO comic maker with your kids? It's called the LEGO Hero Factory Comic Builder. Click to start, and your screen loads with the builder. Select a layout, then choose background(s), character(s), speech bubbles and effects. You can change character positions in the control panel on the left, and change sizes on the slider. The finished comic can be saved to your computer as a pdf, or printed out.

Making comics with something your child knows and loves, like his LEGO toys, is a great way to sneak some literacy into his life. And I bet he'll have fun too!

Read more about comics and cartoons in Book Chook Favourites - Cartoon Creation.

Children's Book Review, Parrot Carrot

Children's Book Review by Susan Stephenson, www.thebookchook.com

Do you love word play? Have you taught your kids to enjoy word play too? If you're looking for a children's picture book that will start a lucky pre-schooler off on the road to becoming a logophile, look for Parrot Carrot. Written by Jol and Kate Temple, and illustrated by Jon Foye, it was published by Allen and Unwin (2011).

This book will make you giggle every time you read it! It takes a very simple concept - what would happen if you mixed an animal with an object? - adds some kooky illustrations and a strong design sense to create a book with lots of mixed-up animals and quirky visual humour. Try to make up your own animal pairs! Addictively good fun. Find the app at parrotcarrot.com

Parrot Carrot is just the right size for little hands, and its soft puffy cover begs to be touched. The illustrations are simple and quirky, a perfect complement to its very simple text. I think it would make a lovely choice as a gift for a new baby or toddler. Perhaps accompanied by a carrot. Or a parrot? Young readers will take pleasure in trying to combine rhyming objects for themselves.

Teaching kids to play with words is so useful for their future. It helps their spelling, their reading, and most importantly, it means they will grow up to appreciate words in all their many guises and formats. They might learn to love cryptic crossword puzzles or scrabble, enjoy writing haiku or heroic poetry, or parlay their way into a creative job in advertising. And they'll join a happy throng that simply loves to mess about with words.

Find more Children's Book Reviews on The Book Chook by clicking Reviews in the right sidebar. 

Looking Back to February 2011

Towards the end of each month in 2011, I revisited some articles I'd written in 2009 and 2010. Not only did that mean new readers of the blog might find something useful otherwise buried in the archives, but it also reminded me of content I could refer to when I wrote new articles.

And here it is February 2012! In each month of this year, I plan to look back to articles I've written in 2011. Don't forget you can always use the right sidebar to find earlier posts. Click Creating, Learning, Reviews, Reading, Writing and Celebrating to explore those themes, or try the Blog Archive to sort by months.

7 Billion from National Geographic Great ad on global population.

Let's Celebrate World Maths Day World Maths Day is March 1, so here are some resources to help you celebrate.

Creative Prompt-Dreaming Online Part of my Creative Prompt series, this posts suggests using a fascinating website, Dreamlines, as a prompt for your own or your kids' creative endeavours.

Make Some Magic with a Picture Producing colour by mouse swipes truly is a little magical!

What's the Use of Picture Books? I asked the question and received lots of wonderful replies!

Create Art at Aminah's World An amazing place where kids can create a digital collage.

National Geographic Atlas Puzzles Online jigsaw puzzles based on different maps.

Make Your Own Mandala Love mandalas!

Let's Celebrate Chinese New Year Resources

Looking Back to February Past This will take you even further back into the past, with selected posts from February 2009 and 2010.

I hope you and your children find some learning treasure or inspiration here at The Book Chook!

Image credit: Graphics Fairy

ABCya - Educational Games for Kids

ABCya is a website with lots of educational computer games for kids. Children can play them online, but you can also download some as apps for iPad, iPhone etc via the iTunes App Store.

ABCya.com is the leader in free educational kids computer games and activities for elementary students to learn on the web. All children's educational computer activities were created or approved by certified school teachers. All educational games are free and are modeled from primary grade lessons and enhanced to provide an interactive way for children to learn.

Grade level lessons incorporate areas such as math and language arts while introducing basic computer skills. Many of the kindergarten and first grade activities are equipped with sound to enhance understanding.

Games are sorted via grade level (K-5). The K letter games are mostly about the alphabet, with letter matching, connect the dots etc, but there are also books to read and a keyboard practice game, basic enough for five-year-olds. Books, such as Lily the Wild Cat, can be shared with a class via an interactive whiteboard. There are also K number games involving simple counting, and some creating games where kids can make cars, houses, robots, faces etc by dragging elements to create something of their own. As you would expect, new and more age-appropriate games are introduced in each grade. Grades are divided into letter games, number games, more games, holiday games and a few games just for fun.

The games are free. There are ads on the website, but that's the trade-off for the games being free. I like that the graphics are simple and colourful, and that the games are neither violent or boring. (The latter depends how sophisticated your kids are I guess - this chook falls into the not-sophisticated game playing class!) I also like how some creations can be saved to a computer, and others can be printed. This means some ABCya creations could be prompts for children's own writing. The games work well, there are lots of them, and the controls are intuitive. Be sure to have a good look around with your kids so they can find something perhaps a little challenging that they enjoy.

Some of my favourite ABCya games:

Paint is a nice drawing game. There's a fill tool, stamps, brushes etc

Word Clouds for Kids is a simple word cloud tool where kids can enter their own words and generate a graphic representation of them. They can tweak the result according to font, colour and layout.

Letter Blocks is great. "Create as many words as possible by clicking and connecting letter blocks. The more words you spell, the more points you get. A fun way to practice spelling too." It's fast, but I think Grade 3 and up could do it because words can be as few as 3 letters long.

Tower of Hanoi is an online version of the board game or puzzle you might know. It's an excellent game for developing strategy skills.

Ten Writing Challenges for Kids

Writing challenges can be one way to switch kids onto writing. Adult writing classes do this too. They ask you to "write a story with no letter 'f' in it" or "tell a story in six words". I believe this kind of prompt can work for some people, some of the time. They're definitely worth a try. Sometimes, by concentrating on the parameters of the challenge, we can unleash our inner creativity. I saw this work over and over with my drama students. If I asked them to choose any topic they wanted to create a scene about, they would spend ages arguing with each other or staring into space. But ask them to improvise a scene about a goldfish, a football player with a problem, and a cranky teacher, and Whoosh! They were immediately full of ideas.

Here are ten challenges that just might inspire some writing in your kids.

1. Write a story about a mad monkey without using "and" once.
2. What if you had a pair of magical, emerald-green, curly-toed slippers? Write about your first adventure without repeating any word twice.
3. Open a dictionary. Put your finger on a word. Do that three times. Use those words in your 49 word story about shopping.
4. Write a story about a wet cat, an itchy shopkeeper, and an umbrella salesman.
5. You look in your pocket and find a miniature unicorn. Describe it in 50 words.
6. Write an advertisement in 67 words for a product called Gloppo.
7. Describe the messiest bedroom you can imagine without once using the letter "m".
8. Write a 99 word letter to the editor, complaining about the children of today.
9. What if you had a pet potato? What would you call it? What would it look like, sound like, do, love to eat? Ask your friend to choose a number smaller than 100 and write this many words about your pet potato.
10. Change the words of a song you know to make a new one.

If you're interested in children's writing, you might like to check out some very popular articles here at The Book Chook, How Do Kids Write a Book Review, How to Encourage Kids to Write, Make Writing Fun - Guest Post, My (Almost) Interactive Prompt for Children's Writing, and Children's Writing - Write a Procedure. I also have a Creative Prompt Series which can be used for writing. You can search under the Writing button in my right sidebar. And one of my ScoopIt pages scoops up resources to do with children's writing.