Read. Write. Thrive!

You never can have too many bookmarks–Lord knows that we have plenty at our house, yet we always are in need of another. This is testment to the fact that the readers in the house are  always working on multiple books.

We craft bookmarks from everything from greeting cards, our drawings, photos, and scrapbooking materials, and seal them with clear household packing tape.

  Here are some weblinks to other ideas for making bookmarks:

Quick and Easy Cross-stich Bookmarks

Oprah’s Personalized Reading Club Bookmark Maker

DTLK Custom Bookmark Maker for Kids

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/Activities/Crafts/Bookmarks

Teachnology Customizer

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/bookmarkfactory/

“We should make another movie on the computer, Mom. That was fun.”  Logan reminded me this morning of a major project we did some time ago that involved scripting a story and making a photo slideshow: ‘The Baby Who Ate the World!”

A 12″ foam model of the planet Earth and Logan’s little brother, Luke,  inspired us to tell the tale of a baby with a voracious appetite who ate everything in his path. His last conquest– the Earth. We brainstormed what would happen, then Logan wrote the story out on storyboards we downloaded. We then staged the photos needed, and located sound effects and a special REM mp3 that we could use in our movie.

We spent the better part of a gray day at the computer together, laying down photos and narrating the script. We created something together, shared it with others, and learned something about the process of digital storytelling.

A rainy summer’s day might be perfect for a family production.

Here are some simple steps to making a similar film:

1: Brainstorm your story together. This truly is the toughest part–getting started and knowing what to write about. If the kids can’t decide what they want to write about, check out some of the prompts on the world wide web.

    Story Starters

The Story Starter

Illustrated Story Starters

2. Map out the story. Logan and I had a clear idea of where our story would end before we began writing, and that helped us brainstorm what would happen to get our hungry baby to the last frame of our film. 

Use story boards to write out the story, plan the photos, and sound effects. Again, you can find lots to choose from on the web.I locaed 44,000 hits from a Google search for story board templates.

3. Stage and take the photos you need and upload them into a file you create just for the project.

4. Use Microsoft PowerPoint as your production software. Lay each of your photos down on a different slide. Use the slide notes section to type in the text to accompany that photo.
Don’t forget to create a credits page and a title page!

5. You will need a  computer microphone to add the narration. Plug this into the speaker or other port.

            On the Slide Show tab, click RECORD NARRATION.

The narrator should speak the narrative text into the microphone, and then click the slide to advance to the next slide.  

When you are done, click the EXIT button and the narration is automatically saved. This embeds your narration to the Powerpoint show.

If you want to add music for the title slide and credits, you can follow this tutorial.

Have fun with your filmmaking!

Logan and I are brainstorming another tale tonight.

I took the two-year-old to his first  Toddler Story Time at the library, just as I took his sister and brother before him.

It has been a while since I had a toddler, nine years to be exact. Long enough to forget that two-year-olds don’t always sit patiently through every story, rhyme, and fingerplay. In fact, my little guy –one of two kids to attend on this blustery and snowy day–was at times more interested in heading out of the reading room and back to the kiddie computer than listening to a stranger read a book about the animals at the pond. He stood up several times while the librarian patiently read, grabbed my hand and said, “C’mon Mommy, let’s go out there.”

The librarian assured both me and the other mom present that our kids weren’t expected to sit in rapt attention, but she did her best to win it, even putting on some music and blowing bubbles.

The session is 20-minutes once a week, and we’ll be back again next week for Round 2.  The more kids attend these readings, the more they begin to enjoy the social practice of reading as a group activity. 

No matter what the age of your children, library storytimes teach them that books and reading are fun and any time you can prompt that, you are building the foundation for life-long readers. They also help develop listening skills and vocabulary, and social interaction skills.

I just saw a news-piece about the top passwords that people use to guard their access to their electronic accounts.

The fact that so many use PASSWORD, 123456, 654321, ABC123, not only demonstrates a disturbing  lack of concern for information security, but also a frightening lack of creativity.

While some are born with the “creativity gene,” it isn’t a trait exclusively determined by nature. Creativity, critical and analytical thinking can be encouraged and nurtured. The earlier we start, of course, the better.

Reading to your children and raising them to be readers develops creativity. Every story you share is a creation of a writer and illustrator who wanted to share his or her make-believe world. Over time, your child absorbs the notion that word and pictures are vehicles for creating and communicating.

Intereacting creatively with our children will also feed and seed  creativity, which could help us to not only lead more entertaining lives, but secure ones!

Here’s a primer:

• Adopt  the Miss Frizzle philosophy: I encourage my college-level writing students to “Take chances and make mistakes.”  Don’t be so quick to “correct” your child’s writing. Put grammar and mechanics on the backburner. Let them get their ideas out, let them develop their ideas, then make grammar a part of the polishing process.
• Make time: We overschedule ourselves and we overschedule our kids. Schedule in some free time for writng and the thinking that accompanies it. I tell my college students that writing is thinking on paper. I also tell them that learning to communicate well in writing is like learning to ride a bike–no one does it by reading the “how to ride a bike manual.” No one learns from a firm classroom lecture.  We observed, desired, and hopped on…and fell. Bike-riding is one risk that we all took with positive results. With time and practice, we gained confidence–some of us enough to ride  without our hands on the handle-bars, some enough to jump ramps and pop wheelies.
• Greet all your child’s writing and drawing positively. You don’t have to overdo it–In fact, you needn’t critique or evaluate it at all. Just acknowledge and appreciate what they’ve done, and make any observations you want to share.  Phrases like, “Wow, you really wrote a lot about this,” “I can tell you had your thinking cap on,” or “This is different from anything you’ve written before. What got you thinking about this?”
• Encourage creative problem solving: Asking your children what they might do in a situation is one way to sharpen this skill. This is a great game to play in the car, but its success hinges on your ability to put on your thinking cap and come up with some interesting scenarios.  Give them mazes–they require you to think “how do I get from HERE to THERE?”   When reading a book together, ask your kids how they might solve a problem the characters are dealing with. “What would you do differently? Why”?
• Model Creative Behavior: Sit down with your kids when they write, when they read, and when they paint, draw, and build…and participate.
• Play word games. Wordplay is creative thinking in practice. You can easily make time for a rhyming game with your toddler, and a “What if…” game with your middle-schooler. My kids always enjoyed “What would a day in the life of a __________be like? “
• Allow some privacy where needed: This is especially important for teen writers. Give them the tools and the time to journal, paint and draw on their own, but don’t push to see their work.

My first grade teacher, Miss Mary Bodi, spent a lot of time bringing out the writer in  her students. Regularly throughout the year, she asked us to choose a picture from a file. In it were magazine advertisements, clipped comics, and other images she’d collected.

One-by-one, were called to sit next to her at a table where we dictated a story that we thought the image depicted. She wrote the story down in a teacher’s perfect script, then at a later time, typed the short-short  stories and gave them back to us to paste onto jumbo pieces of construction paper.

We also wrote a caption or story to accompany every art project we did in the class, whether it was a handprint on a page,  the tissue-paper fall scene, or the cotton-ball snowman.  After each field trip, we drew a picture and wrote a memory. 

At the end of the year, we were rewarded with a two-inch thick book of our writing and illustrations. The book, though a little ragged and word at the edges, is a great grade-school memory. I’m so glad to have this evidence of early literacy that helped shape me as a young writer.

I’ve worked on a variation of this with my two older kids, though I’ve not yet bound them in book form.
The benefits: 

• Using images gives writers a starting point, which eliminates writer’s block. This is especially useful if you have a child who insists they “have nothing to write about.”
• Asking a writer to articulate visuals sets their analytical skills in motion. Like muscles, the more you strain them, the stronger they become.  Analysis is the crux of critical thinking, which the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. Interpreting images and communicating those interpretations is a stepping stone for analyzing ideas in the news and in our reading.  It is critical to active democratic citizenship.

You don’t have to carry this exercise to the publication stage—your children young and younger can still benefit from writing their own captions or short stories to accompany images that you clip from magazines,the funny pages,  or download and print from Google Images. The act of articulating an explanation and narrative to describe a scene can help your child develop story-telling, skills, and nurture creativity and imagination.

An alternative to clipping and writing that is especially beneficial to toddlers and preschoolers who may not be so eager to see their words in print, is to use scenes from picture books. Just flip to an illstration and ask your child what they think is happening. They are not only writing a scene, but exercising their pre-reading skills.

Miss Bodi made this a year-long project. With a limited scope, it is more likely that you would bind the work as a book. Some suggestions: Make this a holiday break or Summer break project.

If your writers-in-training resist sitting for a fifteen-minute jounal entry or other writing exercise, you might have some success weaning them into writing “a sentence a day.” 

 This can be done on a computer, or handwritten in a notebook. I prefer the latter, since flipping to the story will maintain the quick and easy nature of the activity.

You can start the story for them: The old standbys, Once upon a time, there was a __________….and It was a dark and stormy night… are good sparks.  Or the kids can choose their own topics and decide how they want to begin.

At the same time each day, they should add a sentence to the story, developing it over an unlimited period of time (Setting a deadline goal will affect creativity  and story development as the writer attempts to finish in a certain time frame).  As the story unfolds and they decide how it will progress, you may find that they add more than a single sentence at a time.

When the story is finished, you might do some cleanup—helping the author fix spelling and typos. Encourage your writers to type up and/or illustrate their stories, and bind them in simple paper or plastic folders you can purchase at an office-supply store, or create your own covers and bind them with yarn or ribbon.

With a story in hand, your child will be more likely to feel like a writer, which is a confidence builder.

Variations: Make it a group/family activity. Everyone can add a sentence-a-day to a single story.

This December, we read and enjoyed a couple of Christmas books this season with a similar theme–destroying a Christmas play. Both books focus on abhorent characters who display an offensive behavior or two or three, but while this will attract your young reader’s attention, he/she will absorb the overall positive lesson behind the tale.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever–By Barbara Robinson

Though I’d never before read this gem, this is apparently widely recognized as a Christmas classic, as it was published in 1972 and even transformed into a family film in 1983. This timeless and timely book  is about a band of heathen children, the Herdmans, who cuss, fuss, steal,  and enjoy cigars. According to the wizened narrator, they are the worst children in “entire history of the world.” 

When these kids take roles in the church Christmas play just to get their hands on the refreshments, you can just imagine  the chaos that ensues. But instead of ruining the play, the Herdmans teach valuable lessons about the true meaning of Christmas.

What I loved most about this book was the writing–it is sharp, witty,  and full of surprises.  This is a must read!

 Reading level: ages 9-12. Paperback: 128 pages. Harper-Collins (June 6, 1997). Originally printed 1972.  ISBN-10-0064402754.  Source of review copy: purchase.

Horrid Henry’s Christmas–By Francesca Simon

We’d also never before picked up any of the misadventures of Horrid Henry, though he reminds us all quite a bit of Rotten Ralph, Jack Gantos’ rude and obnoxious cat that readers cannot help but love.

Horrid Henry is, putting it mildly,  a mischievous kid,  who ambushes Santa, wrecks a nativity scene, and topples the Christmas tree makes for holiday reading, all to the delight of readers who can’t possibly act out this way. Perhaps that is the endearing quality of these sorts of books–the character can do things that the reader cannot.   

This is entertaining reading, ripe with humor and  fun writing. My son breezed through this easy-to-read chapter book in a day, laughing as he turned the pages.

Info: Ages 7-10. Paperback: 112 pages. Sourcebooks/Jabberwocky (September 1, 2009)ISBN-10: 140221782X. Source of review copy: Publisher

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