Did you remember when I did the Middle Grade Summer Reading Bingo game last year? I had so much fun with that, and several people said they hoped I’d do it again, and so I am! Like last year, I’ve collected a diverse mix of books from a variety of authors: some new releases and some backlist, graphic novels, a verse novel, nonfiction, funny, suspenseful, romance, historical fiction . . . Hopefully, there’s something here for every reader. I put Book Scavenger in the center “free” space to celebrate its 10-year anniversary this year. (Confetti throw, hooray!) If you’re here on my website, then I figure there’s a good chance you’ve already read it, so it likely is a free square for you. If you haven’t read Book Scavenger, you could still consider it a free square, or you could read it! It’s a good book. I’m very proud of it.

Similar to last year, I’ll mail an envelope of bookish goodies (stickers and bookmarks) to anyone who completes a Bingo. You can score a Bingo by reading any horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line of books. Or maybe you want to go for the “four corners” or “outside edge” Bingo, or if you’re feeling ambitious, go for a “full house” and read them all! After you’ve read your Bingo, if you’d like to receive a prize, please fill out this form.

Grownups are welcome to play too, of course! You’re never too old for middle-grade, in my opinion. This can be a great activity for grownups and kids to do together, too. Feel free to forward this message to the readers in your life and invite them to play along. You can find a PDF of the Bingo board here.

All titles are published in the United States, so they might not be as easy to find if you’re in another country, but everyone is welcome to participate, no matter where you live. You could even swap out titles that aren’t available to you for ones that are—I’m loosey-goosey with the rules here. My motivation is really to encourage you to make time for reading this summer and discover some wonderful middle-grade books!

I’ve included all the titles and linked to them on Bookshop, where you can learn more about each one. (If you end up purchasing one through my link, I earn a very small fee, which will go toward reimbursing my shipping expenses for the prize packs.) Purchasing books online through Bookshop also supports independent bookstores, or you can buy them from your local store. And, of course, you don’t need to buy the books to participate! All titles should be available at your local library, and if one isn’t, they might be able to add it to their collection if you make a request. You could also form a neighborhood book club and share the books with each other.

I’ll be sharing my Bingo reads over the summer on Instagram, Blue Sky, and Substack Notes, and I would love to hear about the books you read too. If you share on social media, please tag me so I see your post.

Let’s make this another summer of celebrating middle-grade books and having fun with reading!

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 week on my website, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Substack.

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I love using a picture as a prompt, especially one that suggests a setting with hints of a character, but no actual character. It feels like an invitation to my imagination to fill in the blanks. Who lives in this little cabin in the woods? What are they like? Maybe the someone isn’t even human. Who might the character be then? What is something they wish for that’s difficult for them to have? Why is it difficult? If they made a plan to pursue this wish, what might that look like?

Let’s follow our imaginations and have some fun with this cabin in the woods. Join me?

You can find previous prompts and my responses here.

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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 week on my website, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Substack.

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I loved this essay from Ali Edwards, about the big brown couch that has been with her through multiple stages of life.

“The BBC [big brown couch] has seen Star Wars at least twenty times (probably even more). So many movies and shows. I wonder if it has a favorite.”

I was delighted by the thought of imagining an object with main character energy, and so that’s the inspiration for this week’s prompt.

Thinking about an object as the main character of a story brings to mind two picture books: A Couch For Llama, written and illustrated by Leah Gilbert, and Rick the Rock of Room 214, written by Julie Falatko and illustrated by Ruth Chan.

In Rick the Rock, Rick and the other objects who live with him on the Nature Finds shelf in Room 214 are personified. They have dialogue with each other and Rick yearns for adventure. But he is also still very much a rock. He can’t really move himself around, and while he interacts with the humans in the story, it’s in a rock-like way. He’s not having conversations and sharing his thoughts with the humans.

In A Couch For Llama, there are actually two couches in the story and neither one is personified. But the story gives a sense of life experienced by each object. One couch is very well-loved by its family. So well-loved, in fact, the family decides to get a new couch. The new couch falls off the roof of their car as they bring it home, unbeknownst to the family, and it lands in a field where Llama lives. Llama befriends this couch (in one of my all-time favorite sequences of illustrations), but of course the family soon realizes their new couch is missing and has to go back and retrieve it from Llama, who does not want to part from their new best friend.

Both stories are super adorable and so well done. Highly recommend checking them out!

You can find previous prompts and my responses here.

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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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You can find previous prompts and my responses here.

♥ ♥ ♥

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.