Creativity Encouraged

We love to encourage the girls to be creative. Whether it is through crafts, arts, or other means, creativity strengthens the brain and allows personal expression and out of the box thinking. These are extremely important in healthy development and critical thinking ability.

Because we believe so strongly in encouraging creativity, I was thrilled when we received an unexpected review product in the mail – Thinking Tree Journals! I had hoped to receive one but nope. We were given six to review. I am going to talk about three of them today and the others will be in an additional post next week.

These journals are just a few of the many products created by Sarah Janisse Brown and her family through their company Thinking Tree Publishing. This homeschooling family has created these journals that can be easily adapted to fit whatever need your family has. Today, I’ll be discussing the Poetry Writing Journal, the Creative Writing Journal, and the Big Sister and Little Sister Coloring Book.

Poetry Writing Journal

The official title of this one is Poetry Writing Journal- Color, Draw & Doodle: Do-It-Yourself Homeschooling. It is a soft back journal with laminated paper covers that are very study. It is approximately 9 x 12, so just bigger than a piece of notebook paper. It has white pages with black print. Each two-page spread has a page with an image to color or draw and a page with lines for writing poetry to go along with the image. There are 38 two-page spreads so quite a bit of opportunity for poetry creation and coloring/drawing.

Upon arrival at the house, this one was grabbed up by Miss L. She is 10 and absolutely adores poetry. Creating poetry is one of her very favorite things to do. She immediately sat down and wrote a poem based off of one of the images in the book. She has not colored it the image yet but the poem is just a joy to read. She has since created some others but here is her first one in the book.

Creative Writing Journal

This journal is similar in physical aspects to the poetry journal. It is just bigger than a notebook page and has a soft cover. It includes over 40 two-page spreads for writing stories. One page is an image or a place to draw and doodle images and the other is a lined page for writing a story to accompany the image. The images can be colored and so make a nice combination of image and story. This encourages creativity by giving a prompt that is still somewhat specific but yet very open to interpretation.

Miss E, age 12, grabbed this book upon opening the box of journals and immediately chose an image to spin her story off of. Her story was a joy to read and definitely reflects her personality. She wrote it and enjoyed sharing the story with the family. There are many more images to prompt stories or other writings from and I can’t wait to see what all will come of this style of writing prompts.

Big Sister and Little Sister – a Coloring Book for Two

This is one I really expected to be snapped up. The girls were really excited about it when they saw it but it has only been used once or twice since it arrived. Perhaps with all the excitement about the other journals, this one has been kind of buried. Yet, I think it will be lots of fun for the girls to enjoy together since Miss E and Miss J enjoy listening to audio books together.

This coloring books is also approximately 9×12 and is a soft cover journal. The book has plenty of two-page spreads to keep the sisters coloring together for a while, even if they did one every single day. There are over 30 sets of coloring pages with dulpicate images on both sides of the spread. Some are labeled as big sister and little sister, while others are not. Some of them are printed on both the front and back of pages but there are a number of the image sets that are printed on one side of the page only so that the sisters can color with markers if they choose to without ruining another picture that was colored. I love that thoughtfulness of detail!

My thoughts:

I truly am thankful to have these journals. They came just a couple of days before At Home Dad has shoulder surgery so they provided an easy way to continue schooling when we needed to be busy and away from home a bit more. They could easily be taken to grandma’s house during those first few days of recovery and grandma could encourage school without having to push math or science.

Creative engagement of the brain strengthens it in so many ways and it definitely encourages stretching of thinking and ideas. Allowing the girls to think differently and to express it in a variety of ways is so helpful to them and their development. Thinking differently is a definite advantage and I believe that these Thinking Tree journals are another tool that encourages the giggly girls to think in whatever way they desire. Stronger thinkers are stronger people. Thank you, Thinking Tree, for allowing us to experience some of your wonderful tools for training strong thinkers.

The next Thinking Tree post will include Travel Dreams Journal, Spelling Time, and Mom’s Fun-Schooling Handbook.

At Home.

 

Tagged: creative writing, Elementary, Middle School, poetry, reviews, writing