Engaging a child’s creativity–and your own–can happen almost any time or anywhere.  Years ago, I studied improvisational acting, which encourages actors to listen closely to one another and “find the game” in a conversation.  Bringing these ideas into parenthood has produced wonderful interactions with my son, who is three years old.  As he’s been learning and exploring language, we’ve invented a few of our own call-and-response games.

One game began suddenly as we were driving.  From his car seat, he mischievously called out, “Mama, you are a tree.”  Seeing an opening for a game, I responded “If I am a tree, then you are a small green leaf.”  Delighted, he offered several more “You are” statements to see how I’d respond.  This “You are” game, in which he calls me an object and I call him something connected to that object, has become a way of understanding relationships and creating metaphor.  Occasionally, he’ll disagree with my metaphor and offer his own, as in a recent exchange:

“Mama, you are sweet chocolate milk.”

“If I am sweet chocolate milk, then you are the cup that holds me.”

“No!  If you are sweet chocolate milk, then I am the one who drinks you!”

Also, learning that some comparisons can be perceived as insults has let him to be more descriptive and specific, moving from “You are a baby” to “You are a sweet baby” to “You are a sweet little baby that I like to keep in my pocket.”

Simple games like these are fun, easy ways to transform mundane events, such as waiting in line, into moments of silliness, learning, and poetry.  Why not try the “you are” game with someone you care about?

posted by Tria Wood, Writers in the Schools

[photo by hleo via Flickr]

I find that many children share that fascination with the mysterious, carrying on the age-old tradition of swapping ghost stories at slumber parties or daring each other to summon Bloody Mary in the bathroom mirror.

Recently, I decided to capitalize on this interest in improbable creatures by asking my students to write poems from the point of view of a being or creature that most people say does not exist. Students suggested a great list of possible subjects they could speak for, including ghosts, Bigfoot, mermaids, elves and La Llorona.

The idea of writing from another being’s point of view is intriguing; you must convincingly capture the voice and ideas of someone or something completely outside your normal range of experience. I emphasized to my students that these poems must be a way for these beings to help us humans understand their lives. These could be greatly detailed, such as descriptions of the lengths a rather annoyed Bigfoot must go in order to keep away odious humans that want to pester him, or simple, such as Margaret Atwood’s “This is a Photograph of Me,” written from the point of view of what seems to be a ghost.

Here is one student’s response to the assigment:

Martian

why must people be scared
why can’t they see me
maybe because I’m just made of sand
I will walk till I find out what’s wrong
the Mars Rover will someday be found
I will be known
I will be found
I will meet the people at last
they will know about me
I will meet the water the Earthlings have
I will not just be sand and dust
I will be water and life

by Caroline, 3rd grade

["ghost" photo by Daniel Schwabe via flickr]

posted by Tria Wood, Writers in the Schools

The hardest thing for a writer to do, I’ve always maintained, is to face the daunting white landscape of the blank page. And yet we WITS writers ask our students to take on this fearsome task with each classroom visit. For rising to that occasion, I thank these young writers whose work populates this blog.

Readers, you play an important role also. I am grateful and proud that there are so many who visit A Poem A Day regularly to read the work of our intrepid young writers. Writers aren’t much without readers. Thank you for coming here to read these poems and stories.

Even better, so many of you faithful readers have cared enough to comment on these young writers’ creations, providing encouragement and support as well as appreciation. I want to thank our commentors especially for taking the time to make this blog into not just a publication, but a conversation about young people and their work. The community at Totally Optional Prompts, including Tumblewords, Paisley, Gautami Tripathy, Crafty Green Poet, Linda Jacobs and Mariacristina, has been incredibly supportive through their commentary and deserves a hearty virtual pat on the back as well.

Today is Blog Reader Appreciation Day 2008. Thanks to all of the readers and writers who make A Poem A Day possible. Pardon the pun, but quite literally, we wouldn’t be here without you.

posted by Tria Wood, Writers in the Schools

I recently discovered the delightful book 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore, written by Jenny Offill and illustrated by Nancy Carter. This book’s rambunctious heroine is full of schemes that seem like a good idea at the time, but invariably get her in trouble. “I had an idea,” the book begins, “to staple my brother’s hair to his pillow.” The facing page says, “I’m not allowed to use the stapler anymore.” Through this simple structure, the main character shows us sixteen more brilliant ideas she’s no longer allowed to pursue.

Although the illustrations give us some idea of the girl’s actions and their consequences, the beauty of this book is that it allows the reader to fill in the narrative, giving us plenty of room to imagine exactly what happened as a result of the main character acting on her rather impish ideas. After my third grade classes read this book with me, they were eager to write about the main character’s adventures–and given a starting and ending point framed by the book’s structure, they were confident in filling in the rest. Some were even inspired to continue this theme by writing their own fictional misadventures.

A book that serves as a more sinister jumping-off point for young writers is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg. Each surreal black-and-white illustration is accompanied by only the first line of a story. Young writers are intrigued by the slightly scary mood of the book, and are given enough information in the first line to begin to construct their own stories. The resulting mysteries, ghost stories, fantasy and science fiction tales also give young writers a chance to recognize and employ elements of each genre as well as expanding their imaginations into impossible realms.

posted by Tria Wood, Writers in the Schools

The teacher photocopied her work so that I could include some of it in the class’s anthology; she’ll give the originals to the girl’s family. As I thumbed through the girl’s work, I saw that she had written about how much she loved her mother and grandmother, and I was glad to know that they would be able to see it. As a coping exercise, the teacher had asked her students to write a short essay describing what they would do with their lives if they knew that they would be dying soon, and almost all of them wrote about how they’d hug their families, apologize to their families, tell their families that they loved them. Many don’t do any of this now, they explained, out of pride, guilt, or fear. Typical teenage reasons. Typical adult reasons, too, I suppose. I thought of this girl and how, whether she’d told her family her feelings out loud or not, at least now they’ll have them on paper. They’ll know that she wanted to keep her mother and grandmother with her forever if she could, and how fondly she remembered the smells of her grandmother cooking breakfast. They’ll know the beauty she saw in herself, in her own beautiful brown skin.

Several weeks ago in this class, we had discussed the Edna St. Vincent Millay poem “Childhood is the Kingdom where Nobody Dies.” Of course this conceit is wishful thinking; people die in children’s lives all the time, the students reminded me. From their writing, I know that this is true. Many in the class have lost one or more parents, siblings, cousins and friends, and seem to accept this as par for the course. As children, they were already sitting at Millay’s table with growing numbers of the silent dead. I am lucky to have had so few losses in my own life so far, they tell me, and I agree. This, they tell me, is what their lives are like: sometimes people flash out quickly, and you can’t spend too much time on grieving because if you did, it would never end. “It’s better to deal with death when you’re young,” one student explains, “so that it can’t hurt you as much later. So that you can be prepared.”

But her death hurts me deeply. I feel guilty that I can’t clearly remember this girl’s face, frustrated that she wasn’t there long enough to be cemented in my mind, tremendously sad that all I have of her is her carefully looped handwriting. But I am grateful to be able to pass this gift of her writing on to the family she loved, who will be able to see just how much she truly loved them.