BraveWriter Imaginary "Island" Project

We finally got around to doing the BraveWriter Imaginary Island project!

I've been wanting to do more BraveWriter this year but it is just one of the things that was put aside with all the chaos this year.   A local friend was going to run a BraveWriter group and I thought that would be the perfect opportunity to make sure we actually did the projects, but it's been postponed due to lack of space.  But, during the discussions about the group, Squidy overheard a discussion about the Imaginary Island project.  And he LOVED the idea.   So I finally set it up.

This project is from Partnership Writing, which is geared toward 9 to 10 year olds but I thought it would be right up Squidy's alley.

I didn't stretch out the project for a whole month the way BraveWriter suggests.    Last week I had them write some notes during their journal time for a couple days.  One day was about the people, history, religion and climate; the next day was about the animals and plants.    Then this week I had them type up the information about their civilization (I didn't limit them to an island or continent), and draw a map and flag.

First we flipped through our Atlas and looked at the various symbols used for industry, the way that mountains and rivers looked, and how big cities were noted.   Then they used none of these things when they did their maps.  😂

Vicki didn't get as into the project as Squidy did.  She wrote up a brochure-type list of information.  I did send her back with some edits (she capitalized EVERYTHING, and used apostrophe's for plurals) but mainly let her keep the style of writing.    She drew an island chain but forgot to do her key.

Squidy put more work into this project than I've ever seen him put into anything involving school.   He wrote 5 pages!! on his culture, including detailed historical events, holidays, plants, and animals.  I'm sure allowing them to type their projects made a huge difference in the output.  I did send him back with some edits since he also wanted to use an apostrophe to pluralize.  He drew a world map, complete with key.  

His animal, plant, and royalty names were found by plugging things into Google Translate and coming up with Finnish words.  For example, the kings were named based on their number in Finnish.

Even though it didn't take us a month to do the project, it probably will be about a month before we do another one.  I definitely plan to do more, especially since this was such a big hit.