Magic is messy—and so is making brooms

We read—and discussed Spell Sweeper—in my creative writing workshop with tweens and teens this weekend, so a natural activity was to imagine our own magical brooms and write about them.

Check out these amazing creations!

As you can see, there is a lot of “hair-cutting” that occurs to get the brooms to the desired length and shape. By the end, it looked like wow had experienced an ill-advised encounter with Rapunzel!

This is a pretty simple activity that involves basic supplies: sticks for handles, twine for the straw, some black thread, and white glue (paint optional). For full instructions, check out the Teacher Resource Guide that is available on my website.

I can’t wait to read the stories that accompany these brooms!

As for the book discussion itself, well I really work hard on my students to be honest in their appraisals of books. It’s especially hard to do when the creator is standing in front of you, so in previous years I never led lit circles on my own books for that reason. But then I decided that it’s a better idea that they read their instructor’s work, so now we tackle it as best we can. We rate our books out of ten, and I’m happy to report that my book received an average score of 8.15/10. (Actually, I’m extremely happy with that because it proves that they were indeed honest).

I will mention that Zuki, the magical fox creature (kitsune) was by far the favourite character.

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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!