HAPPY NEW YEAR! HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Guest Post by Susan L. Roth

Many Americans welcome the new year with parties, fireworks, feasts and champagne at midnight. And what do we do the morning after? We make lists of New Year’s resolutions. Do we keep them? Well, we try.

New Year’s Day is our once-a-year-day for a clean slate, yet another chance to do better and be better. On New Year’s Day everyone is full of good intentions.

New Year's Eve in NYC, Illustration Susan L. Roth

Diets and exercise usually top the list, but really, lists can go on and on and on: Read more good books, work harder, work longer, be more polite, stop being impatient. No more bad words, go to sleep earlier, get up earlier, hang up clothes instead of dropping them on the floor! Be better! Be nicer! Be more generous! Be more appreciative! Be a better friend! Be a better neighbor! Be tolerant, be understanding, be kind, be GOOD!

Chinese New Year, Illustration Susan L. Roth

Once the list is begun, it can quickly fill the page, and usually the list is adhered to, at the beginning, anyway. But what if we were given a plethora of second chances for celebrations as well as for second chances to improve ourselves?

Every Month is a New Year, (Lee and Low, 2017) a book of poems by Marilyn Singer, illustrated by me, is a book full of Happy New Year celebrations from all over the world. I learned so much from making the pictures for this book:  there are no two even similar looking. And as for resolutions, every page turn affords a fresh start.

Muslim New Year, Illustration Susan L. Roth

Herewith I am presenting you with another big list full of related activities for students, at least enough for an entire happy new year.

1-Ask students to write a short piece about the new year celebrations that they enjoy in their own families. 

2-Suggest that they create an accompanying illustration. My favorite medium is collage, but they should choose their own favorite.

3-For the most energized, curious and adventurous students: let them try to find other new year celebrations not mentioned in Every Month Is A New Year that they can write about and illustrate.

4- Invite your group to make a joint project calendar of happy new year illustrations which could certainly begin in February or March. Pictures would not have to correspond with unusual-to-us month-specific celebrations, but rather, personal ones. If there are more than a calendar year's worth of students in your group, continue the calendar for as many months as there are students. The finished product could be presented as a big wall of illustrations as well as a calendar, designed to fill a bulletin board, and/or it could be a consecutive band of illustrations designed to go around the walls of a classroom.

5-Encourage each student to start his/her own list of resolutions. Designate one day every month for looking back to see how they did. Invite anyone who managed to keep his/her resolution for that month to give a 30 second speech telling about it. Was it easy? hard? worth the effort? Does the student feel proud and victorious? Take time for applause! 

Do the same for anyone who wishes to tell about failing in the attempt, with applause for the courage it takes to speak about the failure. (This should be handled with humor).

6-Encourage a designated time, probably monthly, to look into each of the cultures explored in Every Month Is A New Year. The back matter in the book includes great explanations and resources for each holiday.  For example: make a dragon; watch wheat grass grow fast daily, right before everyone's very eyes, in a little dish in the classroom; make a kite and fly it; eat green grapes. With permission and supervision, break pots. (Do skip fireworks and firecrackers).

7-Maybe you could even create a brand new holiday: Happy New Month! Let it include a short monthly LITTLE party, and don't forget the Happy New Month's resolutions.

8-Finally, here are some heavier thoughts to think about, write about, to illustrate. 

Encourage everyone, including teachers and librarians, to think about the concept and idea of starting new, starting over. Why is the possibility of one more chance to BE better and to DO better so important? Does hope REALLY spring eternal? And why do we have celebrations anyway? for incentives? for rewards? just because they are fun?

I hope this food for thought gives you something to ponder all year long.

http://susanlroth.com/

Read Africa

by Karen Leggett Abouraya

It’s almost Read Africa Week – that first week of February when Africa Access encourages everyone to kick off Black History Month with great books about Africa. There are lots of resources and booklists online, including the 2017 Children’s Africana Book Awards.

Let’s look at Chicken in the Kitchen, by Nnedi Okorafor, illustrated by Mehrdokht Amini (Lantana Publishing). Okorafor shares the masquerade culture of West Africa through a young Nigerian girl who fears – then adores – the giant chicken in her kitchen.

·       Ask students to write about someone they didn’t know or someone who scared them (even just a little) who later became a friend (or at least less scary). How did the change happen? How does that affect the way you meet new people now?

Chicken in the Kitchen also provides opportunities to talk about visual literacy. With Instagram stories and Snapchat images, television news and Twitter photos, images can galvanize a nation and even the world.  Are young people learning to interpret, gather information and take meaning effectively from images?

·       What does this image in Chicken in the Kitchen tell the reader about Anyaugo’s community? Here’s what the Africa Access reviewer  noticed. See how many of these observations your students notice.

o   “To the left we see two couples in traditional dress symbolizing gender parity in the production of yams; to the right musicians, also in traditional dress, play local instruments. The backdrop shows a town with houses and apartments rather than a rural setting. The children attending the masquerade sport Western dress and local designs.”

·       How do pictures help tell the story of Anyaugo and the chicken? Notice for example, how the Wood Wit appears in images before being mentioned in the text. How many Wood Wit images can your students find?

o   Ask children to write a letter to the Wood Wit asking for help with a task – and then pretend they are the Wood Wit and write a response. This could be a group project as well.

In my book Hands Around the Library: Protecting Egypt’s Treasured Books (a 2013 CABA winner) and its accompanying website, there are news photos from the 2011 Egyptian revolution that illustrator Susan L. Roth translated into cut-paper collages, adding rich interpretations to the story. 

·       Ask students to choose an interesting news photo or image and re-create it as a drawing, painting or collage. You can also provide random news photos to students and ask them to write a caption or paragraph; then compare their writing to an actual news account of the event in the photo.

Read Africa Week is an opportunity to focus attention on individual countries and stories from a continent many Americans know little about. It is also an opportunity to begin adding these stories to your year-round reading lists – along with attention to the increasing importance of visual literacy.

This is Just a Test -- Collaborative Writing

Guest Post by Madelyn Rosenberg and Wendy Wan-Long Shang

When we worked on our new middle-grade novel, This Is Just A Test, the two of us (Wendy Wan-Long Shang and Madelyn Rosenberg) collaborated, sending our manuscript back and forth, back and forth, until it was complete. In school, kids collaborate all of the time, on science labs, social studies projects, sports teams, and of course, on writing assignments. Most of the teachers we’ve talked to say that the main way their students collaborate on writing is through peer editing. We thought we’d offer a few ways to have them collaborate on the writing itself.

Character

Our character, David Da-Wei Horowitz, is Jewish (like Madelyn) and Chinese-American (like Wendy). Little pieces of our own experiences and culture went into forming that character, along with plenty of things that are just David’s alone.

Have your students work in pairs to build a character. Think of it like the Build-a-Bear workshop: You’ll be discussing what the character looks like on the outside, but to create a true character, you can’t forget the stuffing – the things that go inside.

Have your students go back and forth, adding one trait at a time until they decide the character is complete.

What does the character like?

What is the character afraid of?

What does she want?

What does he like to eat?
How does she get along with her mother?

This Is Just A Test is set in the 1980s so it counts (much as we hate to admit it) as historical fiction. This assignment can work well as an introduction to historical fiction. Are your students studying World War II or Ancient Civilizations? Have them create a character from the time period they’re studying. How would that character’s fears and foods and fun be different from today?

Setting

Now that your students have a character, have them collaborate on a setting. They can brainstorm and draw. Complete sentences aren’t necessary, just words, phrases and ideas. The focus can be close (the character’s bedroom) or from farther away (the city or woods).

Story

Try brainstorming again, with plot, before having your students sit down to create their story. Make sure they negotiate: Would our character do this? Would our character say this? And make sure they read for voice. Assignments like this help them learn to pay attention to each other’s writing styles so they can make them similar – so that the text and dialogue sound like they’re coming from the same narrator and the same characters.

Is the character serious or sarcastic?

Does she use certain phrases?

If there is interior monologue, how does the character talk to himself?

When our agents said they couldn’t tell which one of us had written what in our book, that was when we knew we had a true collaboration.

Feel free to throw out a few touchstone words to help students find inspiration (yellow, hard drive, cantaloupe) a sentence they have to use (“Oh, it’s on.”) or even a situation (“It was not the sound they expected to come out of a space ship.”) If you’ve chosen to go with historical fiction, provide some old newspapers and photos.

Another type of collaborative story is where authors take on different characters with different perspectives instead of joining forces for one. Given our current political climate, the idea of exploring situations from different perspectives is especially appealing. Our story would have been completely different if it had been told from the point of view of Scott or Hector instead of David.

Shout Mouse Press explored different perspectives on a large scale, when they had students work together to create The Day Tajon Got Shot. Author Jen Malone and six co-authors approached the night of a dance from different perspectives in Best. Night. Ever.

Consider a prompt where each student takes on the perspective of a different character. You can divide into larger groups for this one. Students must agree on plot and setting, but they have more independence in creating their characters. They’ll have to consider, though, how the actions of one character influence another.

For more on Madelyn Rosenberg, visit www.madelynrosenberg.com.

For more on Wendy Shang, visit www.wendyshang.com

For more writing prompts by Madelyn and Wendy on collaboration, 

Reading Rockets  or Kate Messner's website.