Bear Necessities of Writing app for iPhone and iPad

The Bear Necessities of Writing: An educational app that helps students add detail to their stories making their writing more interesting to their readers.

The “Bear Necessities of Writing” is designed to help children develop their writing skills. The writing toolbox was created to help inspire students to write with more detail.

Children will learn to add details to their writing by “cracking open” plain words that do not create images in the minds of their readers. The app uses eggs the students can choose to “crack open”

How does it work?
What images does the sentence “The lady was old” create in your mind?

Students learn when we use plain words such as “old” their story will not be very interesting, they have to “crack open” the plain words and use words that create images in the mind of the reader. Students will “crack open” an egg that has a word or an emotion on the outside to reveal a sentence and an image. Students brainstorm other words or ideas that help us to see what the plain word “old” might look like if “cracked open”. They develop a list of words or phrases they can use to build a sentence that will create images in the minds of their readers.

The following are some suggestions offered by students for the word “old”:
Grey hair, wrinkled face, hunched over, walking cane, cracks in her face and walks slowly scuffing her feet.

The sentence “The woman was old”. Is then transformed into:

“The wrinkled face, grey haired lady scuffed her feet as she slowly walked down the street.”

The images created in the mind of the reader of this sentence is much more detailed.

The “Bear Necessities of Writing” assists students in learning how to “crack open” words and make their writing much more descriptive and interesting.

More lessons can be found at www.bearnecessitiesofwriting.ca