I am from
The tree that stretches and withers
In the sunlight.
I am from hands with scratches from climbing trees.
I am from
My brother’s arms strong with hope and youth.

We spent some time writing about ghosts, ghost stories and imagined both sides of supernatural experiences, both from the ghosts' perspectives and the haunted person's. 

...a week or so later, i was walking to the bathroom to brush my teeth before bed. and i heard someone pushing furniture around above me. and the next night father said he heard it too. and then my sister Molly said the covers had been pulled off her mysteriously in the night as well. so i knew i wasn’t going mad....

We began by writing about some of our biggest mistakes, and listing our small but significant, daily successes. "Once upon a time a koala named Joey was escaping from his home in Australia..."

By creating collages of different images, we composed visual maps of stories we then began writing, using language to describe both the images we used in our collages, and the images we saw in our minds! "A rusty arm and leg lay abandoned underwater..."

This week we wrote about our names, and created fictional characters by playing a name matching game. "Anasthesia Rose Hope is a miserable being. She is weird in many ways, like you and me. She eats the crust of of her pizza first, she is to lazy to take the time to make french pressed coffee, so she pours boiling water in her mouth with coffee beans to keep her awake in the night..."

We explored the different roles that adjectives, nouns and verbs play in our writing this week by creating our own MAD-LIB stories. "It was love at first sight, she knew it was..."

This week we wrote about places that have shaped and influenced us, places where we feel at home. "My room smells like my cat named finley..."

This week we wrote self-portrait poems after doing a free-write based on the words: I come from... "i am from hot coffee in the morning, i am from lazy weekends on the couch." "I am… That girl that lives in the house with the screaming goats and crazy chickens."