Scribble Scribble Joy Joy! (apologies to Ren and Stimpy)

   Being last to blog on a topic is tough stuff.  Everyone has said what I was going to say, and all my reasons sound incredibly selfish.

   Hang in there with me.

    Writing is where I find my joy. I am never so happy as when I am in the "zone," writing away, forgetting where I am. (Conversely, I am never so miserable as when I am stuck in a world of my own creation, trying to write my way out without a map.)

    Many of my students come in the door loving writing.

    And a lot of them don't. Parents no longer mistake my writing camps for an ESOL class or remedial grammar.  What I do get are kids who are afraid to put a complete sentence together. Thanks to the "testing" system of "teaching" writing, students are terrified to take chances. Maybe they'll make a mistake. Maybe they'll spell something wrong. Maybe they don't know the right word in English for what they want to say. Their regular year teachers are focused on the five paragraph essay, because that is what is tested.

     There is no test for creativity.

     What I try to give my students is the joy of writing. The rules for writing a five paragraph essay are not the "rules" of creative writing. There are no "rules." (There really are a few, but I sneak them in as creative "suggestions" during revision.)

      I give them "permission' to write whatever they want (barring the obscene or racist). Someone always tries to test me.

     "So I can write about zombies?"

     "Sure, just so long as you aren't re-writing an episode of The Living Dead. I will know." (And I will, too. I don't watch TLD, but my daughter does.)

     "I can write about soccer?  Hockey?"

     "Why not?"

     Once they are "permitted" to use their imaginations, I try to give them the Joy of Discovering Just the Right Word."  English is a difficult language to learn, but the vocabulary...so many words, so little time. (By the way, we never use the word "vocabulary."  We talk about finding "better words.") Why use a worn-to-the-ground word that doesn't really say what you mean, when you can find a ripe, plump, juicy one that is EXACTLY what you are trying to say.  The thesaurus (which I can never say without stuttering, lisping or both) becomes their best friend. I discourage them from using the thesaurus from whatever writing program they on their home computers. They offer a paltry selection, usually of the overused variety. Think the McDonald's Dollar Menu vs the one at The Cheesecake Factory. (If you aren't familiar with CF's menu, the last time I was there it was 32 pages of small print. Plus inserts. And specials. And of course....cheesecake.)

Desperately seeking the right word in thesaurus. 

Scribble, scribble, joy, joy!

 Kids who were stuck in a six word/noun/verb sentence pattern, branch out into other ways of writing. Sentence fragments. Run-ons. Single words. Made-up words (as long as you know what they mean, and so will the reader). It's all creative. Creative writing and a five paragraph essay have one thing in common: they use  words.

    So what do I like best about teaching--sharing the joy.  Watching their faces take on that other-worldly look as they scribble in their notebooks....putting the "right" words together, building their own special world.

    Because their joy rekindles mine. Teaching refreshes my own writing soul. Their enthusiasm and love reminds me of why I choose to write for and work with children.

    See, I told you. Purely selfish reasons.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

  

Can We Give the Exclamation Point a Rest?

     Young Author's Camps are well under way. It's Sunday night, and I am anticipating tomorrow's new group of writers. To (sort of) quote Forrest Gump, "Writing campers are like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you are going to get."

    If this camp is true to form, it will be a Whitman's Sampler of writers. Kids whose parents think I am running a remedial writing boot camp despite the Parks' Department naming the program "Writing is Fun!"  (Remember that exclamation point.)  Learning disabled kids.  Kids who are there because their parents need a place to park them for the week...and mine was the only camp that still had openings. (Always flattering to hear, "You're all that was left.") And of course, there are usually some kids who there because they love to write. Usually. Not always.

   For the last several years, every session has had a core of writers for whom English is a second language. No one can put together a perfect English sentence the way a 10-year-old who learned the language in school can. Their subjects and verbs agree, something that seems "optional" to a number of "English only" kids. Tenses don't leap from past to present to future in the same sentence.  Punctuation is meticulous. Speaking of punctuation, these ESOL kids have learned the Power of the Punctuation Point.

    A lot of kids let the exclamation point do all the heavy lifting in a sentence.  Rather than show the reader fear, joy, surprise (fill in the emotion here), they toss big handfuls of exclamation points instead.  A paragraph of five sentences will include six exclamation points. (More is better, right?) After awhile those little points seem to rise off the page in platoons, stabbing at my eyeballs. A slight exaggeration, but after awhile all you see on the page is !!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Example:  I was so sad when we moved!  I left all my friends behind!  I didn't know anybody at school!  I hated school! I was always in a bad mood!  Even my dog was in a bad mood!!!!

    Why are these kids so dependent on the point?  My first thought is to blame texting and email which has shrunk language down to emoticons and acronyms (OMG, LOL, 😄).  But most of my students are not allowed on social media, or have email accounts. Back in the day, teachers blamed comic books for sloppy punctuation (Pow! Biff! Bam!  Take that, Batman!).  I haven't run across any of comic fans among my writers.  Video games like World of Warcraft or Call of Duty, yes.  Comic books, no.

     There are a handful of chapter book writers who go over the top with the punctuation points for comic effect. I'm not laughing, but the kids are.  Still, even those writers do it a couple of times per book at most, not every sentence.

    It comes back to something I've posted about before...vocabulary.  For my young writers, it is easier to use my two pet peeves, the word "very" combined with an adjective and an exclamation point.  In revision of their work, I encourage them to find another way of expressing the emotion without using "very."

   Example:  The test was very hard!

  Alternatives:  The test was: challenging complicated confusing demanding difficult exhausting puzzling tiring unclear. (Pick one.)

  Each of the alternatives offers a clearer picture of how or why the test was "hard."  Was it physically
hard?  Did your head ache?  Did you write so much your hand hurt?  Or was it hard to understand?  Were the directions unclear?  Did you mix-up your facts?  Or were the questions more difficult than you expected?  Or did it just make you think harder?  "Hard" can mean a lot of things in describing a test.  What exactly did you mean?

    At this point I bring out my trusty thesaurus collection: beginners, intermediate and Roget's.  My students are familiar with the thesaurus...the one on their word processing program.  I compare the meager selection offered by the computer program to the many, many options in the thesaurus. They learn they cannot slide by with what I call "wimp words"...words too general to say what they mean. The substitutions for wimp words are in the thesaurus.  By the end of the week, they have almost eliminated phrases such as very beautiful, very hot, very boring. Instead, flowers are exquisite, days swelter and TV shows uninteresting.

    Once the "enabler" word "very" disappears, the punctuation marks often disappear as well.  At least they do in descriptive passages.  They still seem to show up in dialog.  How else do you show some one is excited?  Example:  "It's raining!" she said excitedly.

   In this case, the culprit is "said." Said is a perfectly good word.  It's meant to be unobtrusive in dialog.  Sometimes, however, you want to know how that sentence is...well...said. How could you show the speaker is excited without that pesky exclamation point?  Swap said for one of the following verbs:  screamed, shouted, yelled, exclaimed, moaned, groaned, cried, wailed, howled, wailed, gasped, choked,shrieked, rejoiced, squealed, cheered, announced.

   If after all those choices the writer still can't let go of that exclamation point, I issue an ultimatum. Two exclamation points for the whole piece.  More than two, I tell the student, "Imagine that I control  the world supply of exclamation points.  If you wan to use on, they are now a hundred dollars apiece."  The silliness of the notion usually makes the writer think twice about using them.

    Again, in the words of Forrest Gump..."And that's all I have to say about that."

    No exclamation point.

    BOOK GIVEAWAY

    Today is the last time to register for our give away of JoAnn Early Macken's board book, BABY SAYS MOO.  For details, see JoAnn's June 12 post.

    Posted by Mary Ann Rodman


   

V is for Viper: The Word Game

     Remember school vocabulary tests?  Lists of words that you probably would never use again once you took your college boards?  (I don't remember the last time I used the word pusillanimous, do you?)

     Those old words lists did have their uses. Occasionally a decent word popped up, one that you could use in every day life without sounding pompous or pretentious (like those two words, for instance.)

     My writing camps this summer had some outstanding writers. I did not realize at first, that roughly half of my campers were ESOL students (English Speakers of Another Language.)  The only giveaway was a somewhat limited vocabulary.  They tended to use the same words five and six times within a couple of paragraphs.

     My Young Author camps are about fostering a love of writing...not to teach grammar, spelling or punctuation.  That's the job of the school.  However, without a good working vocabulary, your writing will never improve.  In other years, I have had kids keep vocabulary lists...words they have come across in reading, or have heard, to look up on their own. This year's group was much much younger than usual, and were not reading particularly challenging books.  So how to build vocabulary and still have fun?

    The Word Game.

     This is actually a rip off of one of my favorite games, Scategories. Scategories is played with 4-8 people.  Categories are called out (colors, dog breeds, sports) and then a letter. The player has to come up with a color or dog or sport that begins with that letter. Anyone whose answer is duplicated does not get a point. Anyone who find a unique word for that category and letter, scores a point.

     I had the campers write the alphabet down the side of a sheet of notebook paper, as if they were numbering for a spelling test.  I then would announce a category ('actions kids do",  "another word for sad" "an animal") and gave the group five minutes to come up with one word for each letter with double points for "hard" letters (X, Q, V,Y).  When the time was up, the kids shared their lists.

    This worked on several levels.  1) These kids were competitive.  2) They couldn't cheat because duplicate answers didn't count. 3) They learned from each other when they shared their answers with the group. 4) Because it was a  game, no one ever realized we were building vocabulary.

    Best of all, we had fun. So much fun, some days the kids wanted to cut their breaks short and play "The Word Game."  You can't ask for a better result than that!

P.S.  I sometimes use a version of this when I am trying to think of character names rapidly...although as of yet, none of my characters have been named Xavier or Yarnell.

     Don't forget their is still time to enter our latest book giveaway for TA Esther's baby board book TXTING MAMA.  Click here.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Links for Easy Summertime Living and Learning

Why not make the living – AND – the learning easy this Summertime by signing up to receive daily and/or weekly emails from three of my very favorite all-year-long online services?

(1)   A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

The New York Times called A.Word.A.Day “The most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace.”

Monday through Friday, subscribers receive a new word, one of five purposefully grouped words that underscore a particular teaching point.

This past week?
Selected words were those that appeared to be misspellings:

calyculus
swoopstake
theocrasy
agrement
jargoon

How fun to learn why and how they weren’t!

Take a look at Friday’s post for jargoon to see all that each post offers:

jargoon

PRONUNCIATION:
(jahr-GOON)
MEANING:
noun: A colorless, pale yellow, or smoky variety of zircon.
ETYMOLOGY:
From French jargon, from Italian giargone, from Persian zargun (golden). Earliest documented use: 1769.
USAGE:
"The genial jeweler then suggested white jargoon."
P.G. Wodehouse; The Intrusion of Jimmy; W.J. Watt and Co.; 1910.
Explore "jargoon" in the Visual Thesaurus.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. -Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, professor, attorney, and writer (1914-2004)

I especially enjoy the Visual Thesaurus.

I especially appreciate the added inclusion of previous days’ words, just in case the definitions and pronunciations had somehow lost their place on my brain’s Hard Drive.

Click here to increase your vocabulary on a daily basis.  

You can send a Gift Subscription too!

(2)  TransparentLanguage – Learn a New Word a Day in a Foreign Language!

Thanks to my bi-lingual Brazilian-born grandson, Brazilian Portuguese is my Transparent language of choice.

Truthfully, I still don’t speak this language well – and my sweet, sweet lindo namerado (handsome boyfriend) recently turned three.
BUT, I do understand his words and conversation.

I especially love the ability to hear a native speak the word, not only by itself but in a sentence.
And like A.Word.A.Day, I can always return to previous words that – somehow – refused to stick.

Today’s entry?

Portuguese word:          Amanhã
English translation:      Tomorrow
Part of speech:              Adverb
Portuguese examples:  Meu filho chega amanhã de sua viagem.
English examples:         My son arrives tomorrow from his trip.

(3) Booklist Online 

I have always relied on Booklist, the bi-monthly review journal of the American Library Association, available at most libraries, to keep me sharp and smart when it comes to the best of children’s books being published. I’m happy to report that many free Booklist offerings are now available online. For example, the Great Reads page, with terrific book recommendations for both kids and adults, Booklist’s Common Core resources homepage, the Bookends blog by Cindy and Lynn, the monthly youth e-newsletters Quick Tips, aimed at connecting books to the classroom, and the new e-newsletter focused on YA Books, Booklandia, and the free Webinars.  Maybe amanhã you'll check out the above, then sign up to subscribe, thus making your summer's living and learning link-easy?! Esther Hershenhorn P.S. Don't forget to enter our current giveaway for a chance to win a copy of Jill Esbaum's brand new nonfiction book, Angry Birds Playground: Dinosaurs (National Geographic). See Jill's post for details.