Birthdays, Chickens, and Writing Fun!

by Laura Gehl

I Got A Chicken For My Birthday, written by Laura Gehl and illustrated by Sarah Horne, is about a little girl who wants tickets to the amusement park…but receives a chicken instead.

After you read I Got A Chicken For My Birthday to your students, you can use the story as a writing prompt in the classroom. Here are some suggestions to get kids writing:

1) In this book, the chicken builds Ana an amusement park in her back yard. If you received a magical engineering chicken for your birthday, what would you want your chicken to build for you? Describe the creation you would wish for.

2) Ana has a special relationship with her grandmother, Abuela Lola. Think of a member of your family, or a neighbor or family friend, who is special to you. Write about that person and why you feel close to him or her.

3) At first, Ana is disappointed that she received a chicken instead of tickets to the amusement park. Have you ever received a gift that you weren’t expecting or didn’t want? What was it? What did you want instead?

4) The chicken gives Ana a list of items needed for building the amusement park. The list has both practical items and silly items. Make up your own list of supplies for building an amusement park. What would you include on your list?

www.lauragehl.com

Storytellers -- CABA Awards

by Karen Leggett Abouraya

“There is a unique kind of magic that comes from hearing a story told. With only the power of a voice, an entire world can be created,” writes Evan Turk in the author’s note to the new book he wrote and illustrated, The Storyteller.

The Storyteller is one of this year’s Children’s Africana Book Award (CABA)  winners.  The awards honor books that contribute to an accurate, balanced picture of Africa.  The Storyteller takes place during a drought in the ancient Kingdom of Morocco. Only the power of storytelling is capable of filling everyone’s brass cup with water to share.

Encourage children to write their own story – and then share the stories out loud or with pictures. Talk about what makes a story so exciting that readers or listeners never get bored and keep wanting more.

·       Are there stories or legends you hear at home about the countries or places where your parents or grandparents were born?

·       Can you imagine a story to explain a natural phenomenon – like why fireflies sparkle at night, what the man (or lady) in the moon might be thinking or why pandas love to eat bamboo?

·       Write about a day in your life when something magic happens to you – like the boy in the story whose brass cup is suddenly overflowing with water.

Each of the 2017 CABA books could generate writing prompts – beginning with finding out more about the African country featured in each title.

The 2017 CABA Winners are:

·       Gizo-Gizo! A tale from the Zongo Lagoon (Ghana) by Emily Williamson with the students and teachers of the Hassaniyya Quranic School in Cape Coast Ghana/Sub-Saharan Publishers / available via African Books Collective

·       The Storyteller (Morocco) by Evan Turk/Atheneum

·       Amagama Enkululeko! Words for Freedom: Writing Life Under Apartheid (South Africa) Anthology/Cover2Cover/ available via African Books Collective

2017 CABA Honor Books

·       Aluta (Ghana) by Adwoa Badoe/Groundwood Books

·       The Bitter Side of Sweet (Ivory Coast) by Tara Sullivan/Putnam

·       The Boy Who Spat in Sargrenti’s Eye (Ghana) by Manu Herbstein / self-published for international distribution via Ingram Publishing Services /Techmate in Ghana

2017 CABA Notable Book

·       The World Beneath (South Africa) by Janice Warman/Candlewick

This is the 25^th anniversary of the CABA awards - 90 books set in 24 countries have been recognized since the awards began.  The authors of all seven 2017 winners will receive their awards at a celebration dinner November 3, 2017, in Washington, D.C.   

Ten previous winners are also attending the dinner, including Kathleen Wilson winner of the first CABA, five-time CABA winner E.B. Lewis and two-time winners Liz Zunon, Baba Wague Diakité and Ifeoma Onyefulu.  Ntshadi Mofokeng, representing the NGO Equal Education will be coming from South Africa, author Manu Herbstein will be traveling to the celebration from Ghana, Adwoa Badoe from Canada and Janice Warman from the U.K. Click here for tickets and more information. 

On Saturday, a free CABA family festival will be held at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.  Children can learn to spin a yarn and weave a story, based on tales from Ghana, Morocco and Ivory Coast.  A panel of CABA authors/illustrators is featured and both current and past CABA winners will be signing their books. The event is free and open to the public. More information here. 

“When a storyteller dies, a library burns.” Old Moroccan saying

 https://childrensbookguild.org/karen-leggett-abouraya

MAGICAL HAPPENINGS IN A NIGHT GARDEN

by Laura Gehl

The Night Gardener, by Terry and Eric Fan, is the story of a town where something magical is happening.  Each night, a mysterious Night Gardener trims a tree into a wondrous creation—a cat, a bunny, a dragon.  And then one extra special night, a little boy named William is invited to help!

The Night Gardener makes an excellent writing prompt for the classroom.  After you read the book aloud, here are a few ways to use this beautiful picture book with your students:

1)    What if each student in your class had the chance to become a night gardener?  Challenge students to make a list of the tree creations they would wish to produce. In the book, trees are trimmed into animal shapes, but your students need not limit themselves to animals.  What about a tree in the shape of a lollipop? A robot? A dress?

2)    In The Night Gardener, the townspeople are changed by the beauty that the Night Gardener brings. Ask your students, “Other than trimming trees into fantastic shapes, what are other ways that you could beautify your neighborhood in the middle of the night?”  Students can write their own ideas, which might range from picking up trash to painting happy faces on parking meters to planting flowers in vacant lots.

3)    This book is written by two brothers.  Ask your students to think about whether it would be easy or hard to work with a family member—a sibling, parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or cousin—to create a book, a painting, or another type of work of art. Ask each student to write about which family member he or she would like to collaborate with, and why.

4)     Give students the chance to look closely at the illustrations in the book, and specifically at all of the townspeople. Do your students see people of varying races or ethnicities? Ask each student to write about why including diverse characters in picture books is important.

The Night Gardener reminds us that small actions can have big consequences, and that it only takes one person to change an entire town forever. Each one of your students can make a positive difference too!

www.lauragehl.com

Writing Instructions with A Fairy Friend

Guest post by Sue Fliess

To believe in magic fills the heart and mind with wonder. As a child, I always imagined I wasn’t alone and believed that some kind of magical creatures must exist. Were there aliens? Beings that we couldn’t see, but lived among us? So tiny we didn’t know they were there, or so big that our Earth could fit on their fingernail? I thought anything was possible.

In my newest book, A Fairy Friend, illustrated by Claire Keane and published by Macmillan, I write about magical, mystical fairies; how they live among us, and how one only needs to know where to look and what to do to attract one.

The story invites the reader to join that miniature dream world by giving detailed instructions on how to do so. 

Want to have one come to you?

Here is what you need to do…

Build a house of twigs and blooms,

Decorate her fairy rooms—

Walls of blossoms, cotton floor,

Sparrow feather for her door.  

This is a great opportunity for you to have your class write their own set of instructions (explaining to them that they are writing from a second person point of view), talking directly to their reader. 

Have students choose something they are passionate about—sports, dancing, dogs, playing an instrument, building, cooking, etc. The first few sentences can be description about that topic or thing.

Friendly fairies soar the skies,

Ride the backs of dragonflies.

Wings of fairies shimmer, spark,

Twinkle, glimmer in the dark.

The next part can be where they write out instructions on, for example, how to score a goal in soccer, how to teach a dog to sit, how to pirouette, construct a fort, or even how to make a peanut butter sandwich.

Encourage them to be as detailed as possible, and to assume that the reader has never tried this particular thing before. If possible, as with the dance move, have the other students follow the instructions of their peers.

They can wrap it up by writing about the results of following the actions – how it feels to score a goal, what it’s like to perform a ballet recital, how yummy a peanut butter sandwich is, and so on.

Many reluctant writers find writing instructions lots of fun. And it is a welcome change for  students to be able to instruct someone else on what do to, instead of always being told what do to. 

BIO: Sue Fliess ("fleece") is the author of numerous children's books including A Fairy Friend, Calling All Cars, Robots, Robots Everywhere!, The Hug Book, Tons of Trucks and Shoes for Me! Her background is in copywriting, PR, and marketing, and her articles have appeared in O the Oprah Magazine, Huffington Post, Writer's Digest, Education.com, and more. Her Oprah article was included in the anthology, O's Little Book of Happiness. Fliess has also written stories for The Walt Disney Company. Her picture books have received honors from the Society of Children's Books Writers and Illustrators, have been used in school curriculums, museum educational programs, and have even been translated into French. She's a member of SCBWI and The Children's Book Guild of DC. Sue lives with her family and a Labrador named Charlie in Northern Virginia. Visit her at www.suefliess.com.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

guest post by Katherine Marsh

Just after midnight, Mary Hayes crept into the kitchen of the Buffalo Asylum for Young Ladies and opened a small door on the side of the enormous cast-iron stove. Then she took a deep breath and shoved herself inside.

These are the first few sentences of my new book, The Door By The Staircase. Want to know what happens next?  If you do, then I’ve done my job as a writer.

“What happens next?” is one of the most important questions to make a reader ask. We have a lot of fancy ways of talking about this: suspense, mystery, conflict, foreshadowing, cliffhanger. But these terms all really mean the same thing: Show your reader that something interesting and unusual, something dangerous or scary or magical or problematic, is about to happen. Make them wonder about it enough to turn the page.

The Door by the Staircase is about magic. Magic works best when you show but also conceal at the same time. That’s a lot like writing. Great writing shows just enough to hook the reader and make them read on but doesn’t rush to give away the whole story.

The first lines of a book are a key place to make your reader wonder what happens next. Here are a few I love:

“’Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ asked Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.” (Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White).

“Kouun is good luck in Japanese, and one year my family had none of it.” (The Thing About Luck, Cynthia Kadohata)

“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” (The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman)

Note that even though only one of these lines starts with an actual question, they all raise intriguing and troubling questions that compel the reader to keep on going: What bad thing could be happening with that axe? And why is Fern’s father marching out with it just before breakfast? What happened to the narrator’s family during the year of bad luck? How bad could it have been? Whose hand was in the darkness? And what were they doing with that knife?

Writing Exercises:

1) Ask students to think of a family story. It could be funny, sad, scary, or exciting. Ask them to come up with a first line or couple lines that would make a reader want to know “what happens next?” Let students read their lines aloud and note the lines that pulled them in most. Afterwards, lead a discussion about the most popular ones: What about them pulled you in? What did they show? What did they conceal or not tell you? How did they make you feel? How did they set up a sense of conflict, tone, or character?

2) There’s more than one way to start a story. Working off another book students have read in your class, ask them to come up with an alternate first line or couple lines that would also draw readers in.

3) Have students come up with a first line or lines for a fictional story. Collect and anonymously read them aloud. Have the students vote on their favorite. 

Katherine Marsh is the Edgar-Award-winning author of The Night Tourist, The Twilight Prisoner and Jepp, Who Defied the Stars. Her middle-grade fantasy, The Door By The Staircase, comes out January. In a starred review, School Library Journal called it, “A sparkling tale full of adventure, magic, and folklore.” A onetime high school English teacher and journalist, Katherine lives in Brussels, Belgium with her husband, two children and cat, Egg. You can visit her at www.katherinemarsh.com