This year I have a personal goal to do more writing “play,” so I’m creating weekly prompts for myself and sharing online, in case you’d like to join me too. I hope you will! Teachers, you’re welcome to use these with your students. I’ll be posting these every Wednesday on my website, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Substack.

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Whenever I share my picture book A Good Deed Can Grow, I always encourage readers to sit with the book and explore Holly Hatam’s charming illustrations. I swear, every time I look through this book I notice details I hadn’t seen before—and I’ve looked through this book A LOT. An especially fun challenge for the littlest readers (okay, me too) is to look for the hearts. Holly wove them into the story on every page in some really creative and fun ways.

I was recently looking at the illustrations (again), and it occurred to me how the variety of characters would make interesting jumping off points for writing. So that’s our prompt for this week: Using the below spread from A Good Deed Can Grow, choose a character (or characters) to write about. You could write about them in the exact moment they are pictured or put them in an entirely different scene. Anything goes! Just think about one of the characters, imagine what they might be like, and let that inspiration guide you.

 

You can find previous prompts and my responses here.

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If you want to receive all my weekly writing prompts in your email, subscribe to my newsletter/Substack and click on the link to manage your subscription. There you should see a Notifications section and you can turn on/off which emails you’d like to get from me. Reach out if you have questions—I’m happy to help! Your questions also help me understand what’s working/not working with Substack, as I’m still getting the hang of things here.