Today is our first day back after Christmas break. This is the first holiday in 14 years that I have taken where I wasn't thinking school prep most of the time. LOL. I took a real holiday for once. Funny how it feel like it has been months instead of weeks since the last day of school.

That means I feel really out of step this morning though. We are getting a planned 9:30am start to allow the kids a bit of transition time to getting up for school again. During the holiday we all got turned around with staying up late and sleeping in. The boys are already busy working on their 40 minute writing warm up now, but Melody still has her bedroom door closed getting dressed. It is 10:08. Hmmm, grace or firmness? Don't you hate parental moments like this?

The 40 minute writing warm ups typically run about 3 to 5 paragraphs. That is about all you can do in 40 minutes. Here is the one assigned for this morning :

Openning - Moody:

Begin your story with a stormy, nightime opening. Build tension to the opening climax of the power going out. Introduce your character(s).

 

Main Body of the Story:

Decide on what will happen in your story and build tension to the climax of the event. You may want your story to be spooky, survival-oriented, romantic (ha, ha), or even inventive. You decide.

 

Resolution:

Make sure your ending is satisfying to a reader.

 

They will be posting their writing warmups to their homeschool blogs today as well as to their writing e-notebooks. They haven't blogged in a while, so it is a goal of mine to get them back to daily entries again and having them use the guidelines for content that I gave them. They had devolved a bit into simple lists of what they had done that day with a tone more of defending why they did what seemed to be so little. I was aiming for something more substantial when we began the blogging project. We are going to give it another go. Maybe the entries will be more on target.