Kids Poetry Challenge week #1

Last month was National Reading Month and we had such a great time doing our celebratory theme: 30 Days of Books, (flip through for tons of book recommendations for all ages... even grown-ups!) and participating in the Read-Along at Helping Little Hands. We read so many great books, and did a bunch of fun activities, and, though we'll be continuing to do that, of course, I was a little bummed that it wouldn't be quite as focused or intentional. ... but... I stumbled upon the beautiful and fun Brimful Curiosities Blog via the Ultimate Blog Party (yay!) and she is doing a Kid's Poetry Challenge during the month of April. (double Yay!) 

We'll do one of these each week this month, and link up with Brimful Curiosities to see what everybody else is doing! Join in!

For our first poem, we used a Chippewa Indian Song called 'A Song of Greatness.'

here's an excerpt:

"When I hear the old men

Telling of Heroes,

Telling of great deeds

Of ancient days,

...Then I think within me,

... I too, when my time comes, 

Shall do mightily."

The boys love hero stories and have been in a bit of an Indian craze lately, so I thought this would be a great inspiration for art. We spent some time looking up information about the Chippewa, and found out that :

## They called themselves the Anishinabe, which means 'original person.'

## They live in North America, especially in the northern US and southern Canada. 

## They lived in wigwams or tipis depending on location. 

## They wore clothes like These.

And then we went to work on our illustrations. We used the fun watercolor colored pencil technique to make the drawings bright and colorful. 

If you've never done this before, it's super easy and ends up looking a lot like a watercolor painting, but without the mess. (less mess = happy mom). 

Quick little explanation, if you'd like to try: you just take a regular set of colored pencils, and dip them in water as you would a paintbrush, before coloring.    We've found that soaking the pencils for a few minutes before using helps the led become nice and soft and watery. Also, that normal printer-weight paper isn't really good enough for this type of technique, as it tends to rip and tear. 

Here are the finished works: 

Max's, titled: 

Young Brave Dreams of Killing a Bear Like a Great Warrior.

Annika's, titled:

An Indian Girl and her Mama in their Wigwam Doing Grown-Up Things Like Cooking and Setting the Table

And Owen's, which he calls:

Chippewa Brave Listens to the Old Men Speak, and Dreams of Brave Things

Thanks for playing, everyone, and pick up a poem today! 

If you're at a loss for where to start, here are some great ones for us big kids:

W.B. Yeats, When You Are Old

Billy Collins, I Go Back to the House for a Book

Margaret Atwood, Spelling

Dorothy Parker, A Thought For a Sunshiny Morning

to rhyme and meter and the love of cadenced words,

-shawnacy

linking up to:

30 days of lists - final wrap-up

It is boggling my small brain to think that March is over. I swear it was just New Year's Eve, last week... 


But the days go relentlessly by, and we do the best we can to just hold on. 
And with the end of the fickle month of March (honestly, 6 snow days and a ton of windy ones, interspersed with an hour or two of sunshine here and there... March is all about the tease.)comes the end of 30 Days of Lists. Sigh. 


I really enjoyed this project for a lot of reasons. (which I will enumerate below, for your inspection. And because, you know... I love lists!)


1. as someone new to the whole blogger scene, it was a great way to get initiated into the creative community.
2. the Flickr Group. seeing everyone's takes on the list was so awesome, and a great way to get to know other bloggers!
3. the sheer awesomeness of everyone's pages pushed me to create something unique, something better every day. not in a competitive way... just as a means of very real inspiration. 
and 4. it was an excuse to do something creative and fun each day. 


and so, I think you should all jump on board without hesitation for the next time. I'll be sure to let you know what's coming. 


and for the final round-up, here is my last little group of lists:


Prompt: {Today i saw}

Prompt: {Things to do in your Hometown}

Prompt: {Books i want to read.. you know i loved this one. The hard part was containing it on one page}

Prompt: {Guilty Pleasures}

Prompt: {I make lists for_____}

Prompt: {I'd Rather Be ______}

Prompt: {Places I want to go. Loved this one as well :) }

To check out all my lists (disclaimer: i only have 25 of the 30... alas), descriptions and conversations, go HERE. 


And to check out the three lovely ladies behind 30 Days of Lists, take a peek at their blogs:

Kam

Amy

Justine

Thanks, girls, for a great month!

- shawnacy

japan

i know it's been a few days, and my thoughts on the disaster in Japan ought to have faded and receded into the background. but i can't shake it. it feels like a palpable...compression... erg. i'm having a hard time finding the words. 
it's not that i feel any sense of impending doom. though devastation could strike at any time, it's not so much a looming fear that i'm struggling so much with, as it is a sort of... density. as though there is something hovering just overhead where before there was only open space... 
i had thought of it as a kind of shadow. grief can sometimes follow you around in that way, coloring things grey, and cold.


this isn't quite that. but close, perhaps.


i keep seeing it in my head. over and over, the shaking, the buildings swaying, the crumbling and groaning and clattering of a city, a coastline, shivering to bits. and then the water. the impossibly tall wall of ocean barreling toward the island, the crash of it, the all-encompassing, all-devouring mass of the sea pushing its way across the face of a nation. indifferent, merciless, indomitable.


i saw This Video recently. it was showed on japanese news but not here. watch to the end, it's a little long, but it was unutterably powerful to watch how quickly the water rose in this place. carrying first debris, then cars and trucks and buses and boats, and eventually houses and buildings as though they were toys in a bathtub. 


i keep wondering what people are doing there now. right now. in this moment. how are they living? what are they eating? what about the children? the lost? and because i have no direct acquaintance there, and no face to put in my thoughts, and because it's difficult to think of a tragedy of this magnitude in terms of EVERYONE without simultaneously making it less human, i've invented someone. her name is Kamiko. she's a young mother, and also a student at the university. she has two children, but one was pinned under the garage roof when the earthquake struck. she was home alone, and unable to get him out before the water came. her home was lost. she has not heard word of her husband. her parents lived in Sendai with her grandmother, and she has been trying to find a way to get there. her baby daughter, just a year old, is with her. it is 7am there. what is she doing now? what is she feeling? where will she go and how will her life unfold now... after this...


maybe it's just the inner narrator that makes me think of things this way, but among the tens of thousands affected by friday's quake, and by the tsunami that followed hard on its heels... and by the nuclear situation that is still going on, and now volcanic activity, there are thousands of stories such as Kamiko's. 


i wish i could fly there and find her and bring her and the baby home with me. i wish i could do more than donate a few spare dollars. i wish... 


but as i cannot, i will pray. i will be aware of others outside the small circle of my life. i will do all i can to treasure the ones i love and make sure we are safe and prepared for what may come. and i will remember. 

and in case you haven't seen it, watch this video from guardian

 - shawnacy

little poem

i've been working on a written piece in honor of the many recent worldwide disasters. i mentioned (or... blabbered on) in an earlier post how the events in japan and new zeland, though half a world away, had felt really really real to me. they still do. i seem to carry it with me like an umbrella, hovering over, shading everything i  do lately... 
and so, because writing is the best way i have of processing things, and, i suppose, because it is in me to do so, i'm writing a little something. it's not done yet, but i think the final stanza is. 


so. in the name of sharing, and opening up wide, below are some powerful images and a small shard of what my heart is feeling for the world.

Remarkable, is it not, 
how we may mourn
Unbeknownst to ourselves
Each light’s small and infinite death. 

- shawnacy

 

30 days of books - chris van allsburg and .... the end of the world.

i've been waiting for this post for a few days now, and am psyched to bring it to you all. 
today's author (on whom i've had an artist-crush since i was about eight) is the disgustingly talented, Chris Van Allsburg. 

creator of The Polar Express, Jumanji, and Zathura, which have all been made into movies (as if you didn't know), as well as The Z was Zapped, The Wretched Stone, and The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, just to name a few. 
his stories are inventive and remind me of a modern-day childrens-book-writing O'Henry; and his illustrations are absolutely breathtaking. take a look:

aren't they gorgeous!


for our book project, we chose Just a Dream, the story of a boy named walter who doesn't think littering is anything to get all worked-up about. 

instead of picking up, walter would rather spend his time imagining how great the future is going to be with all those robots and fantastic inventions. one night, however, walter has a dream. a dream of the future. and what it might really look like if we don't take the time to be responsible with our environment today. 


the illustrations in this book, as always, are captivating, and the images of a world covered in garbage make a strong impression on young readers. 


to bring the idea of responsible environmental stewardship home (even in a small sense) we rode our bikes out one fine saturday to the nearby woods, to do some clean-up.

it's a pretty little strip of woodland that borders our place, and when the snow melts, is home to this cheerful little stream. 

which looked a whole lot nicer after we cleared away all the garbage. the kids had fun hunting for trash, and tiptoeing across the water to pick it up. they kept remarking how inconsiderate the people had been who didn't pick up after themselves. (i had to bite my tongue to keep from reminding them of all the juicebox straws and paper scraps i pick up every day around the house.) 

hard work was seasoned, as always, with fun. 

and getting a little dirty doesn't mean you can't still be cute. 

at the end of the day, we had collected a fair amount of garbage, and everyone was pleased with the day's work.

and, to quote max, 'people should go outside more. nature is so beautiful. and if they see some trash on the ground, they should clean it up, 'cause the trees can't do it themselves.'

so thanks, Chris Van Allsburg for the host of lovely books, and for reminding us to do our part for the world around us and for the future. 

*****

ok. part two of this post. i just found out about this really cool story writing contest going on at Chris Val Allsburg's site. a long time ago, he published a book with no words, called, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. 

the book was a series of 14 of his most intriguing pictures, and the story goes that Van Allsburg was invited to the house of a friend where he stumbled upon these drawings which were like pieces of a picture puzzle. as the website states, "But the puzzles, the mysteries, presented by these drawings, are not what we are used to. They are not solved for us, as the final pages of a book or a film's last reel. The solutions to these mysteries lie in a place at once closer to hand, yet far more remote. They lie in our imagination."  


the story contest is simple. write a story solving the mystery of one of the illustrations in the book. many people have been inspired to do so, including Stephen King (!) who wrote the story of The House on Maple Street

which was included in his book Nightmares and Dreamscapes. this contest is open for anyone, but i especially recommend it for kids. click over to The Site to read some of the story submissions sent in by other kids. 

this is an awesome way to encourage creativity and imaginative thought, and creative writing in your kids. 

so cool!

*****

and lastly, (i know this has been long, but... worth it.... right?) :)
our grown-up book pick of the day:


another imaginative work from a fanciful writer, and one of my all-time favorites (i know, i keep saying that...), Hiruki Murikami's Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

i can't even begin to talk about this book because when i do i don't shut up. it's inventive and original and funny and mind-bending. 

here's the blurb from the back cover:

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World draws readers into a narrative particle accelerator in which a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect.
	What emerges is simultaneosly cooler than zero and unaffectedly affecting, a hilariously funny and deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.

it is all that and more. 

read something today that stretches the way you think.

-s