Yes, It's Been Ages!

It does seem like forever since I've posted anything here, though I have promised myself more than once that I would keep a steady stream of thoughts coming. Well, it just doesn't strike me that every thought I have is worthy of being shared with the world!

On the other hand, I have continued to ride herd on www.kidswrite4kids.com and am working on the second edition of Brainiac's TreeHouse, our showcase journal. A shout-out to teachers: Send your ideas for how to make Brainiac's TreeHouse useful for your classrooms.

Check out "The Alphabet," "No More Photos!" "The Rubber Duck Escape," "Into the Corn," and "The Mysteries on the Fourth Floor" on www.kidswrite4kids.com.

A special hello to Ms. Metz and her students in Alberta!

Check Out Garrett!

Eight-year-old Garrett from Waconia, Minnesota, is on fire to write! Check out his recent poems on www.kidswrite4kids.com: "The Sea," "Flowers," and "The Moon."

We want to encourage him to continue exercising his imagination with rhymed poetry.

Download the TreeHouse Today!

Well, okay. Finally Brainiac's TreeHouse is now available as a POD (print-on-demand). We are off to a slow start, but the important thing is that we are indeed started. I'll be looking for a better POD company as I get the next issue together. That's good news. Other good news is that we have many very good stories and poems from kids in the pipeline from Kids Write 4 Kids.

Teaching Storywriting to Kids: What’s In It for Me?

Well, first of all, I’m a sucker for making a difference in people’s lives. I figure that if I turn a kid on to reading and writing I’ve made a difference. Certainly the teacher who got me going, Mrs. Helen Brandt back at New Hope-Solebury Elementary School, made a huge difference in my life. She saved me and I’ll never forget her.

Another reason I enjoy doing this work so much is that it’s actually fun. Sure, going over the stories and trying to write something reasonably coherent and helpful on each one is drudgery—or can be drudgery, anyway. After a few weeks, it does get to be a grind, but I work through it. I find ways to make it stimulating.

Putting my comments in a speech bubble for a cartoon figure has been a huge help in two ways. One, it’s meant that I’ve had to develop cartooning skills, opening up a whole new creative world. Two, the kids love the cartoons and are much more motivated to work hard after having received them. Forget stickers and simple happy faces! Give them something hand made and unique and they will respond!

Long before I began cartooning, though, I turned myself into a storyteller. Like the drawing, storytelling came about as a way of meeting the kids where they were. It’s magic, pure and simple. Now each time I’m doing a character’s voice or making the sound effects of a fishing line flying out, plopping into the water, and then being pulled in on a squeaky reel, I marvel that they actually pay me to have so much fun!

Oh, not incidentally, storytelling jacks the kids up to write with real energy. Take my word, and 25 years experience, it works. That’s an awful lot of anecdotal evidence.

Then there’s this thing about working with kids. Think of all that kids have to have rattling around in their heads to write a story: Fine motor skills to actually make the words on the page, attention to spelling, punctuation, sequencing, dialogue, scene, setting, cause and effect, problem solving, description, etc., etc. For some kids, this is totally overwhelming.

Forgive me if I get a bit misty-eyed. The world is a tough place. It beats us up and often starts early. To be sensitive to this as we work with kids on a complex task like writing is an opportunity for our own growth. When I’ve got 25 kids to lead, with maybe ten of them struggling painfully under the natural pressure of the task, I’m looking at an optimal time to become desperate and grouchy myself. Maybe I’ve not gotten enough sleep the night before or maybe I’ve over caffeinated myself.

Frustration builds.

What a great time to choose kindness and humor. It’s good for the kids and it’s good for me.

More on the Spirit of Play

It’s all well and good, you say, to want to “inspire” young writers. To “play.” Blah, blah, blah.

But we have standards to meet. Tests to prepare for. Parents, politicians, experts to answer to. We have to create lesson plans and then we have to show them to, have them approved by our bosses. And teachers have lots and lots of bosses. Did I mention parents, politicians, and experts?

These objections are of course well taken. I have no comfortable response to them. But doesn’t it seem that educational
“accountability” has become a tad like the quarterly reports corporations put out and seem to live by? They, the corporations, have stockholders to answer to, and stockholders are impatient. They get nervous if the stock is not “earning.”

Schools have “stakeholders,” a not coincidental choice of terms in our present environment. These stakeholders are an impatient lot. They are caught up in the competition-in-the-world-marketplace obsession that seems to hold the whole country in its grip. They get nervous if students are not “learning.”

And how do we measure that learning? Empirically, of course. By the metrics. By matching the rubrics. By looking at the bottom line numbers delivered by the tests. This looks more and more like a quarterly report of earnings.

It would be silly to argue against measuring student learning, but most thoughtful classroom teachers would tell you that we have gone overboard. Given the present testing environment, it is less and less possible for teachers to teach their passions, the areas where they are most likely to inspire their students.

If we were less hysterical, less concerned with stepping from high school to college to high paying job to comfortable life in a safe neighborhood—all perfectly fine steps—but if we were less hysterical, we might begin making a habit of having dinner together and talking. We might take our time. Read a book together. Talk. Not zone out in front of the new plasma screen as often or as long. Talk. We might then know how our kids were doing without the intensity of testing they now endure and that, frankly, is warping the system.

We are obsessed with having more and have taken the traditional, valid idea that education is the path to a better life and conflated it with business and the false idol of physical and financial security. For some time now, chasing this illusion, our universities have become trade schools for managers, accountants, and marketers, crowding out the liberal arts in prestige and resources. This is a profound mistake.

What we need as a culture and as a polity are fewer expert test takers and many, many more lifelong learners, people who can think creatively and independently. People who will push back—and push us all forward.

A 2006 report by the National Governors Association found that readers of literature—poetry, plays, short stories, and novels—were more engaged in social and civic activities and enhanced community life significantly. This is just one of many studies coming to the same conclusion.

So, yes, let’s inspire kids to love reading and writing. We've long ago proven that going about this with a long face doesn't work. Being joyful, playing, does not equal lazy, so let's keep that spirit of play alive through and then long after elementary school.

The Spirit of Play—Continuing My Unscientific, Anecdotal Exploration of Making Kids Lovers of the Written Word

I ended my last entry like this: “. . . why do we make reading and writing such work for kids? How can we infuse the teaching of these skills with more spirit of play?”

What do I mean by “play”? Should kids act out the stories they read? Should we all just laugh and sing and clown around in classes? Should teachers set kids loose and grant, as if by royal decree, “freedom”?

The longer you look at it like this, of course, the sillier the idea gets. My granddaughters came up with the restaurant idea on their own, but we can’t expect and depend on students in our classes coming up with educational play ideas all on their own consistently enough to justify it as a strategy. That isn’t realistic.

But I’m not thinking of play is quite these terms anyway. I’m thinking of play in terms of “delight.” To delight means to give pleasure and joy.

Allow me to digress.

Many years ago I lived in State College, Pennsylvania. My young son lived a hundred miles away with my ex-wife. Every other weekend I drove down a long, beautiful valley, into another, and then over the Allegheny Escarpment to pick him up for a visit.

I drove a VW Bug for some of those years, a ’55 Chevy pick-up for others. Both were baby blue, but that’s not the point. Neither had a working radio or tape deck. This is long before CDs. Our entertainment was to talk.

“Okay,” Christopher would say as soon as he had settled in and we were on the road. “Start talking.”

“What about?” came my standard rejoiner.

He might say “Abraham Lincoln” or “The Great Depression” or any other historical subject that interested him at the moment. Later, as he got older, he’d sometimes lead us into discussions of world religions.

Well, I’d start to talk, and he would ask questions, and that was how we passed the time driving through that beautiful countryside the four seasons of those years. Being with him and sharing those interests delighted me. It brought me pleasure. There is nothing so joyful as connecting deeply with someone you love.

I like to think that my delight infected Chris with a love of those matters that he asked me to talk about. He’s now a high school social studies teacher, and because he has a deep love for his subject I believe he lights up, delights, in his work.

To feel delight is to feel the spirit of play. Delight is by nature warm. Kids respond to warmth. They are drawn to it. They bond to it. Do a read aloud of Walk Two Moons or another book that you resonate to, lead an open ended discussion of it, and watch what happens if you simply treat it as something that has value to you—not as sacred text leading to salvation!

For a great example of a teacher who has done a beautiful job of this, check out “Ron’s Read Alongs” in the archives of this blog.

All the World’s a Stage! So Let’s Rehearse!

On a recent visit to my son and his family, the granddaughters made me their customer as they played restaurant one afternoon.

I sat reading the paper in their dad’s favorite chair.

“Would you like to come have something to eat at out new restaurant?” I heard a tiny voice ask from behind the newsprint. “We’re almost ready for customers.”

Naturally I said yes.

“Okay, we’ll be ready soon,” Ally, the older of the two, said as she skipped away. “Just look for the sign on the door.”

I waited for a while, then went upstairs where I saw “Open” in crayon on a piece of tablet paper taped to Olivia’s door.

As I walked inside, Ally met me with a polite greeting, asked how many were in my party, and seated me. I was charmed as she handed me a hand-drawn menu.

She stood aside as I examined the menu. When she came back, I made my choices and she took my order to first grader Olivia, who had been busy the whole time in the dormer of her bedroom. This area had been sectioned off with the play kitchen her father had had as a young child. As in most restaurants, there was a little tension between the server and the chef about my order.

“One at a time! One at a time!” Chef Olivia demanded of her sister. “I can only do one at a time.”

She was definitely in charge in the kitchen.

Not long afterwards my server (Ally) delivered a plate of plastic pizza, fried eggs, and hamburger—my order. (I was playing, too, after all!)

I pretended to eat, asked for my bill, worked out a 15 % tip, and was on my way.

All this put me in mind of why and how we teach reading and writing in our schools.

In Readacide, Kelly Galleger references Kenneth Burke’s contention that reading fiction is an “imaginary rehearsal” for life. We read fiction to understand our lives and to imagine lives, worlds, beyond our own. James Wood writes in How Fiction Works that noticing in fiction makes us better noticers in life and noticing in life makes us better makers of fiction. It is a kind of training and rehearsal.

We have long said the same thing about play in children, as I recently saw in my grandchildren. I played a part in an imaginative rehearsal of what it might be like to be a chef in a restaurant, of how it might feel to greet diners as they came through the door. We were involved in play that integrated observed knowledge—How have we seen restaurants operate?—with an imaginative rehearsal of what that experience might be like.

Children, like the rest of us, are trying to figure out not only how things work, but also their place in how things work.

Reading stories and poems—and, I’d argue, writing stories and poems—is a rehearsal akin in spirit to playing restaurant. It’s a getting ready to understand and take part in our world, a kind of dramatic play.

If all of that is sensible, and it is, why do we make reading and writing such work for kids? How can we infuse the teaching of these skills with more spirit of play?

Reading Reasons, Continued

Continuing with my reading of Kelly Gallagher’s work, I want to reflect on the next three of his building blocks for turning kids into readers.

His fourth building block is for teachers to stop grading everything they assign. This may seem like letting students off the hook, but not grading does not need to be the same thing as making them unaccountable. In my many (many, too many) years of teaching college writing, I came to dread each new pile of papers or exercises my assignments generated.

“If you assign it,” I used to say, “you have to grade it.”

How foolish I was. I eventually invented ways to make my adult students accountable for their work through, in addition to other means, classroom exercises. Students worked in pairs or small groups with material they had had to prepare before class. They were, in other words, accountable to one another and, as I floated from group to group, to me.

Gallagher only grades about ¼ of what he assigns. Check out Reading Reasons for the creative ways he holds students accountable for the work he does not grade. Not burning himself out grading everything allows him to give meaningful feedback on the work he does grade. This is essential whether you are teaching reading or writing.

His fifth building block is to provide structure to his reading program. He has his students keep a reading log and, frankly, as I read this I thanked heaven that I am not a high school teacher. Keeping track of four or five sections of teenage logs seems much more than daunting to me. I am not a regular classroom teacher. At the longest, I’m with students 90 minutes a day for a week or two. Reading this section and a recent visit to my son, who is a high school social studies teacher, reminded me of why teachers should be paid much more than they are.

The sixth building block leads into the guts of Reading Reasons: Kids have to understand what reading has to offer them. I'll be looking at some of those reasons as I go on trying to make this blog a bit more of a habit.

What Am I Reading Today?

Quick note: Brainiac's TreeHouse will be ready for you next week. I'm waiting for the proofs from the publisher right now.

The short answer to the question in the title above is Kelly Gallagher's Reading Reasons: Motivating Mini-Lessons for Middle and High School. I read slowly, so I've not gotten too far as of this writing and would like to use this space to reflect a little on what I've covered.

Gallagher's first building block for creating enthusiastic readers is to surround them with lots and lots of high interest books. He uses Warwick Elley's term "book flood" to describe this. "Make your world a world of books," the president of my college told incoming freshmen. Sorry I don't remember his name because that sentence has stuck in my head for many, many years. It was wonderful advice.

I remembered it when my son was born. His room, like the living room in our house and like my bedside table, became a place of books. As he learned to walk, he used to like to pull the books off the shelf and pile them on the floor, then try to put them back up again. He loved to be read to, which we did just as much as he liked, and he loved to simply handle the books. Today? Yup. He's a reader at almost forty, having been raised swimming in a book flood.

Galagher's second building block is to give students a time and a place to read. I'd say this includes having a time and a place to read to them also. And let's not stop this when they are able to read on their own. We all enjoy the comforting sensation of being read to.

Gallagher is an advocate of "sustained silent reading"(SSR). I've been in schools where everything stops while everybody in the building reads silently for ten minutes--principal, teachers, office folks, kids, everybody. What a relaxing ten minutes! What a beautiful sound is that silence!

The third building block, and the last I've gotten to so far, is for teachers to model the value of reading. Parents, too, of course. If all we do is tell them THEY should read, without being readers ourselves, . . . well, you get the picture.

Hey, get yourself a copy of my popular book of drawings and poems, Kerfuffle!

Brainiac's Treehouse Almost Ready!

The collection of selected writing from www.kidswrite4kids.com, Brainiac's Treehouse, is almost ready.

A link will be put on the home page of KidsWrite and another will be here in this space.

This will be a three-times-a-year publication, and as time goes on it will look more and more like a magazine. The cool thing about it will be that it will be all art and stories and poems by kids and for kids!

All classrooms and all media centers should have a copy so kids can see the wonderful work they can do.

In the meantime, check out my collection of rhymed poems and cartoonish drawings. Click on Kerfuffle! to get your own copy.

Kerfuffle! Is Ready For You!

Finally! At last! Kerfuffle!, my collection of poems and somewhat goofy drawings, is ready for you to buy online. Just click on the title, and you will be taken to my Lulu.com storefront. You can order a downloaded copy or you can order a copy to be printed and mailed to you. Happy reading!

Yes, the collection of writing from www.kidswrite4kids.com is coming, too. This has taken much, much longer than I thought it would. Sorry for the delay, but it is coming.

News

Work on the showcase, I have to report, is going slowly. I'll try to speed it up, but other projects have gotten in the way during this past month.

In the meantime, check out some of the new writing on www.kidswrite4kids.com. We have an especially strong new writer, McKinna Pope. Check out her mysterious mermaid tale and the wonderful images in her rhymed poems. We are hoping to see much much more from her in the future. We've discovered a real talent. Welcome, McKinna!!

Everybody, keep the work coming!

Update on the Showcase

The first showcase of selected writing from KidsWrite4Kids will be a slim volume. Eight or nine writers will represent the variety of work that has appeared on the site since its launch. I expect this project to be complete early in July. Thanks in advance for your patience.

As I work on this and think about the future, my vision for the showcase has been changing. Instead of thinking of this as a stand-alone book, I have decided that it will be a periodical, a literary journal by and for kids. Send any ideas for a name for such a journal to me at storymaker@aol.com.

In the meantime, I have been seeing lots of good work coming in for the next edition of the showcaes, which will be published sometime in the fall.

PLEASE NOTE: From June 1, 2009, publishing work on Kids Write 4 Kids assumes permission for the work to be used in a showcase, unless we are contacted to the contrary.

Permissions for Showcase Book

Just a reminder: If we sent you an email asking permission to publish selections of your work from KidsWrite4Kids, don't forget the deadline is June 25, 2009.

We will begin putting the book together very, very soon. Please don't delay if you want your work to appear in it.

The Showcase Book Is Coming!

We have started putting together the best stories and poems from KidsWrite4Kids! Look for this showcase collection at the end of the month. If there are delays, we will let you know in this space.

In the meantime, keep all the good writing by kids coming to the site. Kids, do your best writing. Adults, continue to encourage and help your young writers!

All writing published on KidsWrite4Kids after June 1, 2009, will be considered for a second showcase collection to be published in the fall.

Both showcase collections will be published in downloadable and print-on-demand format.

But Thinking Is Good!

Recently I visited a school to work with fifth graders. As usual, we were doing stories, and that's great. But each morning I was asked to do a short exercise with homeroom groups, a different one each day. The school said, "DO whatever you want. It doesn't have to be fiction."

That sounded great to me. I decided one morning to have the kids write rhymed poetry because I wanted to show them how I find rhymes and how that leads to new ideas in the lines.

I'm afraid it was hard going. "Do you like to think of rhymes?" I asked.

"Nooo!" came the chorus.

"Why not?" I asked.

One boy shot the truth right back. "Because you have to think too hard."

Well, yes. You do have to think hard. I sorta, kinda think that's a good thing, so I'm very, very happy to see some rhymed poems on KidsWrite4Kids. Check out Caitlyn's "Knit 'n from the Heart" and Sterling's "Max." These are fun, clever poems.

You can also go back through my blog entries to see how I find rhymes.

New Writing and New Writers

Welcome Sterling and Caitlyn from Gordon Bailey Elementary School. Both of these new members have written great stories this week, but have given us the gift of poems today. Thank you.

I really love that Caitlyn has written some rhyming poetry. Writing in rhyme is a special thinking skill, so I am sooooo happy to see you doing it, Caitlyn.

Sterling is such an original person! I have enjoyed his wonderful imagination and sense of fun all week. Now I discover that he is a poet! Wow! Cool stuff!

I hope both of you keep contributing to www.kidswrite4kids.com.

Also, Bit continues to contribute. There is no end to Bit's imagination. Take a look at Bit's "The Lost Goddess." She continues to grow as a writer. I am very proud to have her work on kidswrite4kids.com.

Note to Adults: Read to Relax! Kids Will Notice

If we want our kids to be readers, and we do, we need to model a love of reading.

We too often fool ourselves into thinking we are too busy to sit down and relax with a book. We instead zone out in front of the television, convincing ourselves that we need the mindlessness offered there. Okay, sometimes we DO need it! Just not as often as we think.

Let's face it. There is too much noise in our heads, and a good book is one way to silence some of it. Screaming commercials and inane happy talk won't do. I have an old friend who rereads Little Women every time she is sick in bed. The familiar story comforts her, silences some of the worry that comes with being ill.

Every couple of years I reread David Copperfield. It's like visiting an old friend who offers me more with each reunion. Dickens teaches me about life and about writing. At the moment, I'm reading Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre for the first time, and I'm pretty sure I've made another lifelong friend. I am sitting at Bronte's feet--just as I sit at Dickens'--and I am listening. All the other noise of my life fades into silence.

If we want our kids to be readers, and we do, we need to model a love of reading. If we want kids to grow up balanced and wise, and we do, we can begin by showing them the rewards of becoming lifelong friends with a few good books.

A Recent Victory for Writing in the Schools

This happened in a fourth grade classroom a few weeks ago.

Monday I went into one of the classes and noticed right away a boy who seemed oppositional with his teacher. I filed that observation away and went on with my usual shtick—introduced myself, got the 5 senses out of them, drawing a cartoon character on the board as they gave me the info. This holds their attention, draws them in, and wows them all at once. Okay, then I told a funny story using the senses and simile, processed it with them in a high energy q and a. Now it’s time for them to write. I gave them a started, set down the rules, and launched them.

As I walked back by the teacher’s desk, she whispered to me that the kid I had noticed when I came in would not write anything. Well, excuse me, but the way I set things up it’s really hard to NOT write. The kid was writing. I looked over his shoulder and asked if it was okay to look at what he’d written. I think he didn’t know how to say no to me, so I looked at it and noticed the detail. He had a kid looking out a window to a new neighborhood. There were broken sidewalks and three burning garbage cans.

“Cool,” I told him. “Great detail.” Then I walked away.

I stopped by another time and encouraged him and let it go at that.

Tuesday, though, he got stuck, so I helped him get going again, then let him alone. That night I took the stories home, looked them over, put my comment/cartoon/speech bubble on each one, and gave them back to the kids on Wednesday. That’s always a big moment, so I give them a bit of time to walk around and show each other their cartoons.

The kids start a new story usually on Wednesday, but this little guy wanted to continue with the first story. I let him do that and I mentioned to him that I wanted him to be one of the readers at our reading in the library on Thursday. He got a tiny, tiny secret smile on his face and said, “Yeah, I guess so” like he didn’t REALLY want to do it.

His teacher told me he wouldn’t do it. Not a chance. The next day, when it looked like he might just do it, she told me his mother would have to sit right next to him and help him get through it. He couldn't, wouldn't read aloud. I said I’d do that instead if need be. His mother could watch.

Well, the time came, he read, I sat next to him as he read, his voice--I'm not kidding!--getting stronger as he went along. Then I watched the astonishment on his face when the audience applauded. The next day in class he could barely contain his smile.

Hey, folks! Storywriting touched another life!

Gotta Love Bit's Beginnings!

Check out Bit's stories on Kids Write 4 Kids. She's only a fourth grader but already knows how to hook a reader. Bit has created interesting characters and situations.

We will be watching as she continues to develop these stories following the Story Bones we talked about at her school. She has an eye for detail in a scene and a good ear for dialogue. I hope we meet some wonderful antagonists--villains, taskgivers, tricksters, and maybe even some very, very bad choices her characters make to spice up the middles and ends of her stories!

Keep writing, Bit!

Showcase Coming In Late June

We've collected a good bit of fine writing from kids in the last couple of months. This new material, combined with some excellent work from before, has given me ideas.

In the next couple of months I will be picking out the best work from Kids Write 4 Kids to showcase in a publication. It will be available as a print-on-demand book through a link on this site and on the home page of www.kidswrite4kids.com.

Look for this in late June.

My friend Rodney is so excited about this that he's running for his computer right now!

In the meantime, keep those stories, poems, and essays coming!

We Are Growing!

Kids Write 4 Kids seems to be picking up a little speed. We are growing! Thanks to all the young writers who have contributed their creative energy to our reading pleasure!

Check out budding mystery writer Bit's latest postings. They are short, but so nicely written. We are looking at a real talent when we read her work. I can see her character racing out the door to solve a crime with her dog Goldie at her side.

Keep the work coming, Bit.

Of course, that goes for everybody else, too. I have many new friends in Mound, Minnesota, and hope to see even more stories coming from them. Thanks to Joe and Evan. I enjoyed working with both of you.

We are still waiting for a few essays about where some of our readers live, though. Kate gave us an excellent start. I'm sure she'd enjoy reading about life in the United States.

Thanks, Kate!

Parents, teachers, and kids--check out Kate's essay about her life in New Zealand. Just click on the Word Castle and go to Essays.

We have readers all over the world, so wouldn't it fun to have essays about life where you live? Here's a list of some things you can tell us about where you live:

Do you wear a uniform to school?

What games do you and your friends like to play?

Where do you like to go for vacation? Kate likes to go to her dad's boat, which I'd love to hear more about.

What's really special about your country or city or state? Do you get huge rainstorms, snowstorms, or some other drama in the weather?

What do you do at your favorite holiday?

These are just a few ideas. Please add to them as you write about your home. Oh, and you don't have to be from outside the USA to write an essay about where you live. I'm sure Kate would like hearing about other places in the world!

By the way, here's a little about me: I love to dance tango. My sweetheart Sandra (that's her in the picture) and I take lots of lessons and go out dancing a couple times a week. It is sooooooo much fun!

New Good Fun on KidsWrite4Kids.com

Check out the new writing from kids on KidsWrite4Kids.com. Fourth grader Bit has been especially busy lately and has published not only poems, but also a series of stories about her character Katie Kirk. I look forward to reading more entries of her story about the teacher wanted by the FBI!

Check out the essays, too. Even if you don't agree with the writer's point of view, you will have to admit these are strong, strong voices. Colliegirl's comparison/contrast essay is a model of loaded language.

Parents and teachers, keep working with our young writer friends, and show them the way to KidsWrite4Kids.com. Don't be afraid to help them with editing, stressing the importance of clear, consistent, conventionally correct writing. Let's work together to help them become better and better writers.

Residency at Wadena-Deer Creek Elementary School

This was a good bit of fun. The school got a grant a few years ago to develop a reading program, I am told, and as a result their reading scores have shot up dramatically, and—surprise!—The reading shows up improving the writing. I was impressed by much of what I saw. The kids were wonderful to work with, as were the four teachers. Everybody was flexible and upbeat. On Thursday, they started making noises about having me back next year. I certainly hope that works out.

Tuesday they called school off because of the snow storm. Bummer. Then, double bummer, we had a two-hour late start on Wednesday. Okay, I said we were all flexible. This is when we bent. Wednesday we only had to double up one class, meaning we had two sections in one room for one of my contact hours. I taught on Wednesday what I would have done on Tuesday, Story Bones/Dramatic Structure. Oh, and I handed back the stories they had started on Monday with my comments in speech bubbles coming out of the mouths of my hand-drawn cartoon characters. This always pumps kids up. They fell right into the program and went on with those stories. Many of the kids took their stories home to work on over night. (One little girl stayed up until 2 working on hers.)

Thursday all four contact hours were double sections, meaning I saw all the kids twice that day. The morning's lesson was the Character on the Board exercise, where I lead the group through the creation of a character and get them started writing a second story. I encouraged them to change the character as much as they wanted, to think of what we did on the board as a starting off point. In the afternoon I introduced the idea of antagonists--troublemakers I call them--to rock the story along. Again, many kids took their stories home to work on. Friday was a normal day. The kids read stories and asked me questions. I gave them my usual parting sermon about how they can now continue growing as writers.

As always, the magic is in the stories I tell to illustrate the concepts I introduce.

Do We Turn Kids Off to Reading and Writing?

I never finished my M.A. in English at Penn State.

Since finally learning to read in fifth grade, I had loved reading fiction and poetry and history. It was after a few years in the Air Force that I did my B.A. in American Studies on the G.I. Bill, took a year off to live in a primitive cabin in the Pennsylvania mountains, and then started work toward my M.A.

My vision of graduate school?

Well, looking back now, all these years later, my vision was a bit crazy. Somehow I imagined it would be somewhat like undergraduate school: We would read and write and discuss in an easygoing atmosphere. Smoke pipes. Wear corduroy sports jackets with patches on the elbows. It would be a kind of Heaven on Earth and, as teaching assistants with our own sections of freshman composition, we would infect our students with our love of the written word.

Indeed, the teaching inspired me and has sustained me. It changed my life.

But the lit seminars? To say that they were ALL shark tanks would be to exaggerate, but some of them in fact were like that. On the whole, the ten-week classes were forced marches through not only nearly everything a given author had written, but also through a great deal of the criticism written about some aspect of the author’s work. All this culminated in a twenty-page scholarly paper. Imagine reading all of Joyce—from the poems and stories through the novels (don’t leave out Finnegan’s Wake!)—then researching and writing about Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. In ten weeks, thank you very much.

A Ph. D candidate friend from India used to marvel at this absurd way of doing things. He had done his M. A. in a small elite college in Delhi. The method there had been to choose, say, four seminal poems by John Dunne and study them thoroughly as a way of entering into the rest of Dunne’s work—at the student’s leisure. Interestingly, this method looks a lot like my naïve vision of graduate school. My friend felt our method encouraged the mediocre to rise, the interesting to fall. I’m frankly not so sure he was right, as a number of brilliant friends thrived in that atmosphere.

I did not. The experience nearly put me off literature altogether. In my darkest moments I imagined a satanic conspiracy to drain the lifeblood out of literature and any love we had for it. More likely, the English department was justifying its existence (i.e. funding) to forestry or engineering by demonstrating how hard we worked, how we suffered.

I survived, of course. Eventually the bad taste the experience left in my mouth faded, and my love for reading and writing for its own sake returned. But I sometimes wonder how many students walk around with that bad taste in their mouths for the rest of their lives, how many kids we turn off to literacy. Which begs the question: How best can we turn kids on to reading and writing?

So here are a couple of questions. What good is reading fiction and poetry? What does it do for us? And—maybe most relevant for kidswrite4kids.com, what good does writing the stuff do? How can we turn reluctant readers and writers on and keep them that way? How do we motivate kids to love literature for its own sake?

If you send your thoughts to this blog, I will post the best. Let’s get a conversation going.

From the New, Expanded Kerfuffle!

Coming soon on Lulu.com and maybe some other sites as well:

LEON MCLEONARD

Leon McLeonard will say it out loud:
“Don’t expect me to get lost in the crowd.
“My voice may crack and my face flush red,
“But I’ll spout out what I want from my head!”
Leon didn’t always act so, you know,
He was far too frightened to think he could show
That right under his skin he was full of surprise.
“I better leave the excitement to those other guys,
“They are smarter and taller and better looking, too.
“They’ll just stare me down like I belong in a zoo.”
No, not for a kingdom would he utter a word
And risk being trampled by the popular herd.
“I should have said that, and I should have said this!”
But all he could manage was a cowardly hiss.
He’d think and he’d think, and he’d walk away mad
Never ever giving voice to the thoughts only he had.
Then one day when he’d listened too long
An idea in his head went off like a gong!
He opened his mouth and he stammered it out.
“Good grief,” they sneered, “what’s old McLeonard on about?”
They snickered and giggled and generally jeered,
“That McLeonard dude sure does talk weird.”
But Leon kept speaking right on through their din,
And, sure enough, a few began digging his spin.
So he marched on from one idea to the next
As if he were reading from a prepared written text.
It was hard for Leon to believe, but it’s true.
They gathered around and asked questions, too.
Now, even on days when he’s filled full of fear,
Leon McLeonard speaks with good cheer.
No more Leon silent as a cloud.
No more Leon lost in the crowd.

I perform this for 4th and 5th graders. It's great fun if I REALLY, REALLY let myself go!

Why Read? Why Write? Mini-Assemblies

Generate Excitement for Reading and Writing!

3rd, 4th, and 5th Grade-Level Mini-Assemblies

Goal and Tone—This is motivational speaking for kids on the subject of reading and writing, one grade level (3, 4, and 5) per assembly. Limiting the size of my audience to one grade at a time, as opposed to addressing a whole school, allows for better and more relevant audience interaction.
I’ve been exciting kids about reading and writing as a writer-in-residence for over 20 years. I show kids some of my publications, share my original stories and poems, and let them in on my own struggles learning to read and write, making them laugh and keeping them involved in the process. Over the years, I’ve observed others working with large groups of kids and frankly found them wanting. I’m high energy, in my element with children.

Elastic Time—This is up to you. I can do 50 minutes or 75. The best length for most schools is 60 minutes. My time with children seems to fly by way too quickly. I’m happiest with more time rather than less.

Logistics—I prefer to meet with each grade level in a commons area or in the media center. Gyms generally stink as places to motivate kids to read and write. I need a screen to project illustrations and poems from my laptop, and I need a small white board.

Simple Pricing—There are just two prices. One assembly for one grade level is $250.00. If you would like to have a second and third assembly (in other words, serving each of the three grades mentioned above) on the same day at the same location, the total price is $450.00, meaning the second one is at a discount and the third one is free. In the interest of keeping things simple for everybody, I do not charge for mileage.

Contact Me at storymaker@aol.com or call 612-723-8565

Empathy and Insight Follow

Empathy and Insight follow. As writer/imaginer of stories, you have to step into the shoes of your characters. Character building programs in elementary schools ask this of children. Imagine how you would feel (a prerequisite for following the Golden Rule), and then—by extension—how the other person would feel in a particular situation. Kids know that not everyone does this. Much of the current emphasis on “character building skills” in schools is an attempt to train kids to think this way. Story writing can be yet another tool in teachers’ kits.

Problem Solving in Storywriting

Then we have Problem solving. I set up dramatic structure in a problem/solution context. Conflict is a “character with a problem,” no matter how small that problem might be. What will the character do on a boring afternoon? How will the character make friends in the new neighborhood? How will the prisoner escape the dungeon? Many kids are tempted, of course, to jump ahead to a solution: Timmy moved into a new house where he didn’t know any of the other kids in the neighborhood. He felt sad. Then he went outside and met the kid next door and was happy. Such glib, and essentially boring, storylines are discouraged by the requirement to go through the Complication stage, the longest and most involved, of dramatic structure, related to sequencing. In this stage, the writer is encouraged to explore various ways of trying to solve the problem that do not work and/or to send the character on an adventure to solve the problem.

Reasonable Association

Related to sequencing is what we might call “reasonable association.” I touched on this in my blog about the “character on the board.”

This is about creating a world that has its own internal logic. If a fifth grader is writing historical fiction about colonial America, it should go without saying that cell phones are out and building might be pretty drafty in winter time. Sadly, it often does need saying. This a matter of imagining a world different from the one the child lives in, and the pieces have to fit together.

You say your character is a rabbit who lives underground but catches the school bus each morning? Okay. Now you have to imagine that world. Is there a staircase to the warren? An elevator? Where does the rabbit do homework? You say the kids on the bus make fun of your rabbit? Interesting. Why? Because the rabbit lives in a hole in the ground? Because he or she is the only rabbit or because the rabbit has big ears?

The details of the story must make sense when set side by side with each other.

Sequencing

What are the critical thinking skills that story writing demands of students? One is Sequencing. This is always the challenge with k-2. This happened, then this, then this, then that. Frequently, the episodes of a story at this level have nothing to do with one another. The dragon got a splinter in his toe. Then he lost his homework and went to school and found it and---we never hear about that splinter again. When I stoop by the child’s desk to ask what the dragon did about that splinter, I get a blank stare.

The answer? His mother took it out. Or he went to the hospital and the doctor fixed it. Or—just the blank stare. More frequently, though, the child can tell me what happened with the splinter, but somehow that part of the story never got written. Thinking it, dreaming it, was enough for the child, an episode of magical thinking. Or maybe the child is imagining the answer as I’m there asking the question. For the teacher, it doesn’t matter really. What does matter is that we guide the child toward understanding where the dragon’s splinter fix fits in the story and that it actually be written. With a little help most kids will find a good place for it.