At Frog Hollow, we often start the day with a word family, sometimes a spelling family but usually a word root. I'll throw up a big list of words from that root, some familiar, some awesomely new, and then we'll take five minutes to write a sentence or two using at least one -- but sometimes even all -- of the words. This gives the kids a chance to engage with the words creatively and to bring them into their own writing vocabulary. And sometimes they write very funny things.