The mysterious message

I rolled out a fun activity in my creative writing class recently, as part as my ongoing attempt to help my students add intrigue and mystery to their stories. I brought in a stack of envelopes and got them to imagine that one of their characters received a mysterious letter—but a letter that had been through quite an adventure, as demonstrated by the condition of the envelope. 

So . . . we took those crisp white envelopes and splattered and dabbed paint on them to represent mud, we smudged them with fingerprints, we nibbled them with stapler removers, we scorched them with a candle, and we sealed them with wax. All of this was to give the envelope some history and spark that sense of adventure in a story.

Many of the students chose to draw ornate designs on the envelope, and others chose to draw stamps as well. (Doing this activity made me realize that the stamp design could be a whole side project and it would be fun to draw those on a separate page then cut them out and affix them afterwards.)

Of course, the students also wrote something to be included inside the envelope. Some of them had invisible ink messages from a previous class they wanted to put in there, while others chose to write a series of riddles or a provocative threat. 

It was my first time doing this specific activity, but it was definitely a lot of fun to beat up those envelopes! This project would certainly serve as a fun story starter and, in that case, the entire writing assignment could be the letter inside (as opposed to adding texture to an existing story, which is what I did for this particular class).

Creativity unleashed!

Whew! Just wrapped up the last of my creative writing summer camps: Galaxy, Fantasy, and Shipwreck were the three themes, so I explored many different genres and approaches to writing.

First, I’m SO proud of all my students. Look out world—there’s a wave of talented young writers coming your way! Above is a picture of the three anthologies of the students’ work, one for each camp, that we created for the kids.

Second, thank you to my teaching partners Stacey Matson and Marcie Nestman! Couldn’t have done it without you. 

Finally, I’m simply grateful for the opportunities to continue teaching the thing I love most: creativity. The pandemic has been challenging, but has also given me the impetus to expand my bag of tricks, learning new ways to engage students over Zoom, and to work with students not only in my own backyard in Vancouver, but across Canada, the US, Korea, China, Singapore, Australia . . . 

What’s next? A few weeks off to recharge, spend time with family, and to focus on some personal writing projects. Oh, and Spell Sweeper, my latest middle-grade books, is coming out in three and half months—in some ways, that feels like an eternity, but I know it’ll be here before I know it.

A little junk can go a long way when you’re in the creative spirit

I’m just wrapping up a creative writing camp on the theme of “GALAXY.” We’ve been writing a variety of projects, including a newspaper-style article about the discovery of alien evidence, and dramatic scenes of humans having to escape from an alien’s zoo.

Probably the biggest hit, though, was my module on robots. Our camp has all been virtual, but I was determined to incorporate some sort of prop-building activity. This meant a lot of preparation, assembling “robot kits” and sending out the packages to the students in advance. Most of the pies came from household items—paper cups, lids, plastic containers, paper clips . . . yep, a whole lot of “junk” can really add up to something fun and amazing! I augmented the junk with some craft supplies such as gears, brads, and clock hands.

The students loved receiving the kits and the project turned out better than anticipated. Below are some of the amazing models that they made. Many of the pieces move—the dials spin, the heads rotate, and the propellors swivel.

Afterward, we wrote robot instruction manuals and developed communication/language systems to go with them.

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The on in the bottom right-hand corner is actually the one I built as part of demo-process. I call mine a Nerd Detector, but something didn’t turn out quite right, since it kept pointing at me. Oh, well!

A storytelling carnival in Korea

I recently returned from Korea where I led a week-long creative writing camp for tweens and teens with authors Stacey Matson and Dan Bar-el. We survived the heat (at one point, it was 49 degrees Celsius, with humidity!) and managed to deliver a great program for our students.

Creative approaches to writing

Our creative writing camp was delivered through the Creative Writing for Children Society of Vancouver (CWC) and was designed around the theme of a Storytelling Carnival. This gave us lots of fuel for creative ideas—including gift parcels (in old-fashioned popcorn bags) full of fun activities such as yo-yos, stickers, and circus animal erasers.

At our camps, students usually write a lot of stories and poems, illustrate their work, and build props, working towards the goal of publishing an anthology of their creations.

Storytelling

This year, we added a whole other factor under the expert leadership of Dan Bar-el: Oral storytelling. Each evening, Dan led “campfire” sessions, in which the kids created stories and practiced telling them. The younger students wrote stories based around the idea of a carnival and did the storytelling in themes. Our older kids took on a greater challenge: their subject was taking traditional Korean myths and telling modernized versions.

Prop-building, steampunk style

One of the main projects I led at camp was helping the students to design and decorate their own steampunk style books. I did this project at local libraries in BC a couple of years ago, and decided to bring it to Korea.

The idea is that the students not only get a cool notebook by the end of the project, but it can serve as inspiration for a short story. There are plenty of tales of dangerous or forbidden books in the fantasy genre (think of the chained books in Harry Potter), so I thought this would be a good way to stir the imagination.

Here are a few photos of some of their creations:

Character brainstorming

One of my favorite activities that I led was an interactive brainstorming session. I had the kids brainstorm a character who might participate in the circus, including coming up with all the minute details. As a way to galvanize them, I brainstormed my own character at the front of the group, using their individual suggestions to help build my character.

Here’s my character . . . “poop boy”:

And here’s a few of the characters the students came up with:

Afterwards, the project was to write a short “I Am” poem about the character. I decided I would write one based on the group character we developed. Here it is . . .

I am a poop boy

I am a poop boy
Shovelling truckloads of dung
Every
Single
Day.
It never ends.

Lions, monkeys, and elephants
—which is worse?
I can’t tell you.

The monkeys swing above me
Bombarding me with feces.
Sometimes, they even fling it at me,
Forcing me to wear
A handkerchief around my head.

The lions mangle and maul me,
Snatching at me with weaponized paws;
Those razor nails scratch and scrape me
Until I look like shredded paper.

And the elephants?
They leave behind MOUNTAINS of poop.
I wear three masks around my face,
A clothespin on my nose,
Goggles across my eyes,
But nothing seems to work.
The stench always wriggles its way through,
Causing everything to run:
My eyes, my nose, even my ears.

I wish I could run.
Away.

But I can’t
—not if I want to achieve my dreams.
One day, I will stand and strut
In the glare of the bright lights
And be the star of the show
With a crack of my whip
A twirl of my cane
And a tip of my hat.
People won’t call me
Stinky Will anymore.
No, sir!

They’ll look at my fine clothes,
Not handed down to me
From some second-rate clown,
But tailored and hand-stitched
Just for me,
And they’ll call me Ringmaster Will
And all of these poopy problems
Will be just a distant memory.

~

Well, most kids came up with characters far more prestigious than a poop boy! We had a lot of ringmasters, acrobats, and knife-throwers. Having the brainstorming portion completed help them be more detailed in their poems and, also, helped me with editing their work–if, for example, I noticed a dearth of description in their poems, I could point them back to their visual brainstorming.

Many kids took the visual brainstorming to heart and did it for other stories and projects in the camp, too:

The camp was a lot of work for Stacey, Dan, myself, and our team of counselors, but it was a giant success. No one melted in the heat (even when we made the kids go outside for certain activities) and we’ll soon be publishing our anthology.

Here’s a photo of Stacey, Dan, and I and our students at the end of the camp.

There was no rest to be had though; immediately after the camp, Stacey, Dan, and I embarked on a tour of libraries in Korea. But more on that in a future post . . .

A galaxy of adventure at the creative writing SPACE CAMP!

I recently returned from Korea, where, in addition to participating in an award ceremony at the Canadian embassy (read about that here), I led a creative writing camp on the theme of space, along with author Stacey Matson and playwright and actress Marcie Nestman.

Activities to connect writing with space adventure

The purpose of the camp in Korea was simple: inspire kids to write creatively. As such, Marcie, Stacey, and I tried to come up with as many inspirational activities as possible.
Since our theme was space, it wasn’t hard to generate ideas . . .

As an icebreaker, we handed out ordinary objects to kids (such as a fork or spoon) and asked the students to imagine that they had just met an alien and needed to explain the object’s purpose. There was just one hitch: they had to lie!

Intergalactic Explorer Application

In this activity, the students created a character who then had to fill out an “application” to become an astronaut and explorer. This involved a lot of creativity, since students weren’t restricted to imagining human characters!

The Robot Catastrophe

This was one of the main projects for the camp. I brought a load of recycled junk (picked up at the wonderful Urban Source on Vancouver’s Main Street) and asked the students to choose different parts and gizmos. They then designed a robot with a very specific purpose (such as cleaning, protecting, or cooking). Afterwards, they built a physical model of the robot and did two separate writing assignments.

The first assignment was to come up with an instruction manual for the robot. The key here was that they had to provide some warnings. This helped set up a problem for the second assignment, in which they wrote a story about a character who bought the robot, but ignored the warning, resulting in a catastrophic situation.

Here’s some pictures of some of the final models . . . they turned out really well!

The Alien Baby

For this activity, students created their own alien “pom-pom” babies and then wrote a series of diary entries in which they imagined finding the intergalactic visitor. The fun part here, of course, was coming up with all the problems along the way!

Alien Evidence

As you can see, we tried to weave in different styles of writing throughout the camp. We brought in newspaper writing by having the students creating a non-fiction style article about the discovery of aliens on Earth. To go along with this activity, the students drew “photos” of the evidence . . .

Space Food

Even aliens need to eat! This activity helped us introduce the five senses to the students. Marcie prepared a box of “alien food” then had the kids sit in a circle while she handed out samples, one at a time. Along the way, the students had to record their responses according to taste, smell, sound, sight, and touch.

Afterwards, they drew on their experiences to imagine their own intergalactic space restaurant. Many of them drew menus to go along with this activity!

Planet Obliteration, and other fun stuff . . .

Throughout the week, we had the chance to introduce many other activities, such as the visualization of a spaceship crashing, a Space News article, and a whole slew of games connected to our theme. My favorite game was one Marcie came up with: Planet Obliteration. In this game, the students had to use water guns to “destroy” a planet (a bath bomb).

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The camp was a huge success and was capped by a fun ceremony in which we shared our thoughts with the parents of our kids and showed a trailer of the space movie we made. More on that later . . .

 

 

Inspiring young imaginations in Korea

I recently returned from Korea, where I taught a creative writing camp for kids and presented at the Canadian Embassy in Seoul.

A contest to celebrate Canada150

The event at the embassy was an award ceremony for a creative writing competition that was held in honour of Canada’s 150th birthday. The contest was sponsored by The Korea Herald, Air Canada, the Seoul Metropolitan Government and CWC (the Creative Writing for Children Society of Vancouver, a company I co-founded in 2004).

Contest judged by Canadian authors

Over 200 students from elementary, middle, and high schools across Korea entered the contest and were reviewed and judged by three Canadian authors: myself, Stacey Matson, and Kallie George.

It was a great honour to be a judge and to read through all the diverse entries. The theme was a difficult one; in some way, the entrants had to incorporate the idea of “150.” It was quite entertaining to see how the kids wove this theme into their short stories!

A ceremony at the Canadian embassy

The award winners were announced on July 1 (Canada Day) and the ceremony was held on July 22nd at the Canadian embassy in Seoul. Joon Park, who is the CWC co-founder, Stacey Matson, Marcie Nestman, and I attended the ceremony on behalf of CWC. Unfortunately, Kallie George could not accompany us, but she was there in spirit.

During the ceremony, we were privleged to meet the contestants and award them their prizes. There were 30 winners in various categories, with the top winner receiving a free round-trip ticket on Air Canada to travel to anywhere in Canada.

After the ceremony, Stacey and I held a Q&A session with the young writers. We were so impressed by their thoughtful and in-depth questions. I’m so proud of all the kids who entered and of their beautiful words that they dared to share.

 

All contest winners will have their stories published in an anthology.

For more information, check out the article on The Korea Herald website.

About the Creative Writing for Children Society

CWC is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the creativity, confidence and writing capacity of children through tailored writing programs. In CWC’s programs, students are guided by professional authors, illustrators, editors, and actors to write and illustrate their own books, which are professionally desktop published. Founded in 2004, CWC is based in Vancouver, BC.

 

 

Cool creative writing activities—pirate style

Last week author and colleague Kallie George and I finished up a two week creative writing camp for kids aged 9-12 through CWC. The theme was one of our faves: pirates!

Kallie and I have taught many camps before, but we wanted to try and do something a little different this time. Even though the goal of the camp was to just immerse kids in creative writing, we decided we needed to give them a goal.

So, we decided to have them produce handmade pirate “journals” that would chronicle the adventure of a character who ends up sailing the seas.

Once we had that decided, it was just a matter of developing and fine-tuning some topics . . .

Day 1: Introduction – What kind of pirate are you?

For the first day, we just warmed up the kids by introducing them to our theme, having them take a fun quiz (What kind of pirate are you?), and doing some writing warm-ups.

Day 2: Plot me a treasure!

We introduced our overall goal, to make a pirate log book and began the project by drawing treasure maps. One of my goals in all of my writing classes is to have the kids work hard on developing better ideas. To this end, I had them complete a brainstorming sheet before they began drawing.

The brainstorming sheet outlined various features they might include on their map and come up with inventive names for them. I find that many young writers will just pick the first name that pops into their head and not give it a second thought. The brainstorming sheet helped them come up with a much more imaginative and evocative world for their journal.

This was also the day the students began handwriting their journals. Many of them chose to do rough copies that they could then copy into their final booklets (after a quick edit, of course).

Day 3: Pirate Particulars

Pirates love clothes, so on Day 3 we had the students approach character design through a strong visual approach. The kids designed a complete pirate wardrobe for a character, including clothes, tools, tattoos, and the ultimate fashion accessory—a pirate pet.

Day 4: ARG! Pirate Lingo

One of the most fun things about pirates is the way they talk, so we led an activity to help students practice pirate lingo.

Day 5: Settings that Sail

This day was all about the ship and the flag. We showed the students diagrams of famous ships from film and literature (my personal favorite being The Dawn Treader), and went over the flags used by real-life pirates.

Afterwards, the students brainstormed and designed their own pirate flags. Once again, I had the students do a few thumbnail designs before committing to a final since this does always seem to turn up the best ideas.

I ended up designing my own pirate flag, too . . . one to go with a book I’m currently writing.

Day 6: Treasure Ahoy!

We had started the camp giving the kids miniature treasure chests loaded with gold, rubies, and pears. On this day, I brought in other pieces of treasure—mirrors, kaleidoscopes, ancients coins, pots, and so forth. Each student picked an object (and many of them were actual antiques) and were asked to describe it using the five senses.

Once we shared our descriptions, the next task was to invent one magical or unusual thing about the object. So, for example, one student decided that a kaleidoscope showed the true path to the pirate treasure and the other decided that the mirror had captured the soul of a wayward sailor.

Afterwards, we did a visualization activity in which the students all shut their eyes and we played the sounds of a ship at sea during a storm. Afterwards, the students wrote about the experience, concentrating on the five senses.

The purpose of this day was to just make sure the students understood the concept of show-don’t-tell and to help them invest more description into their stories.

Day 7: Sea Shanties

This was one of the most fun days in the camp, as we had the students listen to a cargo of sea shanties then craft their own. Some were ballads, some were call-and-response songs, and others were more free form. Also, most of them were about how to drop me, “Cap’n Wiz.”

Day 8: Legends & Lore

This was a day to bring on the sea serpents! We explored real legends and myths of sea creatures and then asked the students to think about their own monsters by drawing and sculpting them out of clay. Of course, afterwards, they could incorporate these creatures into their pirate journals.

Day 9: Message in a Bottle

By now, it must be obvious that we like buidling stuff in our creative writing camps! On this day, the students wrote messages and put them in bottles, which they painted to make them look like they had been adrift for awhile. The story prompt here was that the students’ characters could be sending out a cry for help.

Day 10: Seal ‘Em Shut

This was the day the kids finished up working on their journals. We had a plan to tea-stain the journals, but then were a bit worried about some of the ink smudging. In any case, this is something the kids could do at home.

The main task we wanted to focus on was making sure the covers look interesting. We procured some brown cardstock and had the kids draw on them with metallic markers. We also got some wax to drip overtop so that they could “seal” them with an impression of a skull or some other design.

I’m pretty impressed with the final products and, considering this was the first time we did this project, it turned out rather smoothly.

Well, now it’s time for me to switch gears and turn my attention to my next summer creative writing workshop series: Galaxy Camp!

 

 

In which we take a field trip to the art gallery

I’m now knee-deep in my series of workshops through CWC called Picture Perfect: Exploring Creative Writing through the Lens of Art History. We’ve made it through the Medieval Ages, explored the Renaissance, and finished off Mannerism just before the start of Spring Break.

One thing that has kept coming up is that very few of my students have visited an actual art gallery. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit many in my time, including heavyweights such as the National Gallery in London, the Uffizi in Florence, The Louvre and Orsay in Paris, and the Chicago Art Institute. Well, we don’t have the budget to whisk my students off to of those vibrant centers of art and culture, but I decided we could arrange a trip to the local Vancouver Art Gallery.

In comparison to some of the galleries I mentioned above, the Vancouver Art Gallery is small and humble. They have plans to move to a new location that will enable them to massively expand their offerings, but for now, what we have is the current location in the former provincial court house. Personally, I love the building and its old-school architecture.

So, I suggested the extracurricular trip to my program coordinator and she offered it to the parents of my students. Many of them (and their siblings) decided to sign up and then I was suddenly faced with the quandary of how to make the experience a successful one.

First off, I thought I could use the small footprint of the Vancouver Art Gallery to my advantage. It would allow me to introduce my students to the art gallery experience without overwhelming them.

So, good—I could contain the experience, and not worry about losing anyone in a cavernous gallery. But the more pressing problem I dwelled upon had to do with technology. Most of my students can barely go three minutes without checking their phones. To me, that type of addled behavior is not conducive to immersing oneself in art.

So, my first instinct was to ban their devices. Then, after some contemplation, I decided to take the exact opposite approach and structure the visit in such a way to allow them to embrace technology—specifically social media.

Most of my students are heavy Instagram users. They even set up a group tag for the class on their own, without my prompting. So, I decided to leverage this and came up with a series of hashtags. I then asked the students to try and find shots to fill these categories as they went through the gallery. These hashtags ranged from sentiments such as #mademefeellikesinging to simple gut reactions such as #wow.

Of course, I provided the students with a few other guidelines, too: Don’t rush, or if you feel the need to rush, don’t pester others to keep up with you. Go at your own pace. And, besides your phone, bring a notebook and a pen so you can make some notes or do some writing if you feel so inclined.

Now that all is said and done, I feel the trip was ultimately a success. I was able to interact with my students in an environment outside of the classroom and engage in some interesting conversations about the different art we experienced. The gallery featured some traditional West Coast Salish art, some modern installation pieces and, of course, what it is best known for—the beautiful dreamlike canvases of Emily Carr. (Incidentally, that’s the part of the gallery I hunkered down in and did some of my own writing.) There was something for everyone.

The hashtag experiment worked pretty well. It gave the students something to chew on, and a bit of a quest. Many of them did in fact post their pictures on Instagram with the hashtags and, of course, my wife Marcie and I made sure to play along, too.

Most of all, it was joyous to see kids making some connections and finding inspiration. After all, what more could you want from a field trip?

Dragon scales at the Magic, Monsters, and Mystery camp

I’m currently in Korea where I’m teaching a creative writing camp with my wife, Marcie. Our theme has been magic, monsters, and mystery . . . so, needless to say, we’ve been very dragon heavy.

I decided to share my prop-building passion with the students and have them build dragon scales. I’ve only done this project for myself, so to roll this out in a classroom with over twenty students was like trekking into unknown territory!

I’m pleased to say the project—both the process and the result—turned out very well. Working on the props taught the students a lot of patience and gave them something to work on between writing their stories and poems.

Step 1 was cutting out all the plastic shapes from plastic bottles.

Step 2 was coating the plastic shapes with the plastering material to build up the thickness and detail.

At this stage, some students were done with the sculpting and had to just wait for their plaster to dry before painting. Others, however, decided to add extra detailing in the form of acrylic jewels or by adding a layer of leather.

The final step was to paint. We had to do this in stages, starting with a base coat and then letting it dry before dry-brushing to add extra texture and gradation.

As you can see, there are some other small props here. We decided to introduce a thief character who wants to pinch something from a dragon, so the students made tools for their thief characters. Some students decided that their thief characters would steal treasure from the dragon characters, while others decided that the thieves would steal part of the dragon—such as a scale!

The final scales turned out really, really well. I find them hauntingly beautiful. Here are just a few of them . . .

Telling our family stories: the box of memories

This week, I held the final workshop in my series on creative writing told through the lens of family stories.

As part of this workshop, we created “memory boxes,” a project we started way back in Class 3. Below are photos of the beautiful boxes created by the students. They are also filled with personal items, but I chose not to photograph the insides—they are personal!

 

They are theirs to keep, but we also used them as a prompt for our last assignment.

In an earlier blog post, I described my own experience of opening my own memory box for the first time in twenty years. So, taking inspiration from that, I had the students imagine a distant descendent stumbling across their own memory boxes and wondering about their original owners.

They then read these stories out loud to their parents and classmates as part of our end-of-term celebrations.

Wow! The stories, like the boxes, were incredible.