Using Middle Grade Books to Teach Creative Writing Concepts and Close Reading

As a librarian, I feel my approach to teaching creative writing serves a double-purpose of also being an opportunity to engage kids in the books in our collection. I read them passages from good books and get the kids excited about reading them. And now, when our doors are closed to the public, I find it even more important than ever to use every possible tool in my toolchest to keep kids reading and give them something to get inspired by.

So my most recent writing class was kind of an interactive book talk in which we delved into each book and uncovered writing lessons from it, using each book as a mentor text. I had a list to work from using the books that we are giving kids as prizes for summer reading. In the past, kids could go through a smorgasbord of books for their summer reading prize. Now they have to select one book from a list and get it via curbside pickup. In light of this I wanted to do some kind of virtual program that would book talk their choices. Creative writing did just the trick!

Hooks

To learn about writing a first page that will "hook" the reader, we read the first page of The Last Kids on Earth and the Cosmic Beyond written by Max Brallier and illustrated by Douglas Holgate. Jack, the narrator, tells the reader that he and his friends are about to be "astro-blasted. Catapulted and launched." We discussed why that beginning is exciting and then tried to write new first-sentences for fairytales, replacing "Once upon a time" with something scary or exciting that's just about to happen.

Character and Motif

We learned about writing quirky characters and running themes or motifs with an excerpt from Gabby Garcia's Ultimate Playbook by Iva-Marie Palmer and illustrated by Marta Kissi. We discussed how sports references are a major motif in the book and wrote our own characters who have hobbies or obsessions and how that could be used as a motif.

Tone and Perspective

We learned about tone by comparing two different passages from Front Desk by Kelly Yang. One passage presented the main character Mia's poverty in an upbeat way, focusing on how she and her immigrant parents try to make the best of it by enjoying things like "free air conditioning" whenever they can. The other passage presented a more painful view of the way poverty and hard work are wearing Mia down. One had a happy tone, the other was deeply sad. Then we tried to write about things that might be seen as either happy or sad depending on the person's perspective.

Humor and Fantasy

We got a funny perspective on fantasy and mythology in an excerpt from the book The Serpent's Secret by Sayantani DasGupta and illustrated by Vivienne To. In the excerpt, the main character Kiranmala informs us that riding a winged horse isn't all its cracked up to be. We played with some other ideas of cool experiences one could have, like riding a dragon, or growing your own wings, and tried to show a funny downside to them. This was probably my favorite activity of the class, judging from how well the kids did with it. They came up with great reasons why each cool thing would be a curse in disguise!

Mystery and Suspense

We learned about one of the key ways that the reader is kept in constant suspense in the mystery novel Finding Mighty by Sheela Chari. You never know whom to trust in this book, since almost everyone you meet is introduced as someone you shouldn't trust. The mystery of the brother's disappearance and the puzzling artifacts he left behind keep you guessing and turning pages! We did an activity working with story starters that could be the first sentence of a mystery story, and added sentences 2 and 3.

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Resources

Slides:

Kids' Writing Workshop: Summer Reading Inspirations from AnnMarie Ppl

Recording:

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/_dckF5vTxEpJTpHpr0HDAIkZBIvPeaa8h3dI_PIFyx3jnf4ladr_v9ZHKmzerjWd

Cool Books with African American Protagonists

A while back, I was helping a dad looking for books with African American main characters. My first impulse was to hand him something by Christopher Paul Curtis--I think I had just finished reading The Madman of Piney Woods and loved it--but he stopped me. He said he was tired of finding African American characters only in books about history. His kids weren't into historical fiction. They didn't want to read about the traumas of slavery, racism and Jim Crow. They wanted to be entertained. They were into sports, fantasy, adventure. The dad just wanted his kids to read fun books and see characters that looked more like them. I ended up giving him The Crossover by Kwame Alexander, and he was happy with its themes about sports, teenage romance, sibling rivalry and father-son relationships.

In recent years, with the #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #OwnVoices movements, there's been an explosion of good, exciting and entertaining books that feature people of color. So this month, Black History Month, in addition to our usual displays featuring biographies of important African American figures in history, I decided to celebrate blackness in contemporary books by putting up a display of general fiction books featuring black kids. 

It's got graphic novels like New Kid by Jerry Craft, Goldie Vance by Hope Larson and Brittney Williams, and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur by Amy Reeder and Brandon Montclare. 

There are fantasy books like Dragons in a Bag by Zetta Elliott and Arcade and the Triple T Token by Rashad Jennings. 

There are page-turning capers like The Great Greene Heist and mysteries like The Parker Inheritance, both by Varian Johnson. 

There are slice-of-life realistic novels like Tight by Torrey Maldonado and the Track Series by Jason Reynolds. And there are books that defy realism like My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich by Ibi Zoboi.

There are early chapter books like the Dyamonde Daniel series by Nikki Grimes, the Sugar Plum Ballerinas series by Whoopi Goldberg, and the Ada Twist, Scientist books by Andrea Beaty.

There are picture books like Max and the Tag-Along Moon by Floyd Cooper, I Used to be Famous by Tara Luebbe, Becky Cattie and Joanne Lew-Vriethoff, Hair Love by Matthew Cherry and Vashti Harrison--and that's just a start! 

So. Many. Great. Picture. Books. If I wasn't so short on time, I'd compile a longer list.

It's so nice to see lots of books nowadays featuring characters of color. There's always room for improvement, but I hope African American families like that dad and his kids found something fun and self-affirming in my book display this month!

Rewriting Fairytales

A couple weeks ago (right before I left for my vacation) we had a fun Kids' Writing Workshop all about rewriting fairytales. I always try to keep my workshops rooted firmly in books in the library's collection, so for this workshop I had fun gathering up all of the Jack and the Beanstalk retellings I could find, and putting them on display! There were several Old West retellings, including one where the Jack character is a cowgirl and one where the Jack character is a really badass Native American gunslinging bandit, two science fiction ones taking place on other planets or in outer space, a few told from the point of view of the giant, a few longer novel-length works where Jack's character and motivations are much more developed and in which Jack interacts with other fairytale characters from other stories, and more, more, more!!

The kids and I talked about what makes a good rewritten fairytale--that it helps to have some sort of "twist" on the story, either by changing a character's gender, age, cultural background, setting, or even the genre of the fairytale (like those Western and sci-fi versions of Jack). 

Then I had the kids draw slips from three envelopes. One envelope had slips of paper with fairytale characters' names. Another had papers with problems or plot elements. And the third had suggestions for how to make the fairytale different with a "twist." Kids drew two character slips, two problem slips and two twist slips, so that nobody was "forced" to write about any specific character or concept but had options to choose from and could go where the inspiration took them! I took pictures of each child's slips:

This child wrote about Rapunzel's witch trying to make amends by helping Gretel, who was blind.

This was mine--I wrote about the son of the Big Bad Wolf being a nerd who is bullied by the sons of the Three Little Pigs!

This child wrote about Red Riding Hood's Grandma and set the story in a different time in history.

This child told a story about Rapunzel's child and had another character turned into an animal.

It was really fun to see what the kids brainstormed for their rewritten fairytales, and also how they managed to tell their stories with interesting first-person points of view! I know I'll be doing this workshop again and am sure I will once again find lots of inspirations in the books here at the library.

Poetry Creation Stations

This Friday, I'll be trying something a little different for my obligatory National Poetry Month session of our Kids' Writing Workshop. I purchased a few cool items that I want to share with the kids:

Haikubes

These are cubes or dice that have a variety of words you can choose from to make a haiku. The game is that you are supposed to roll a red cube that will give you a prompt, but I might leave it more open-ended for the kids. I liked exploring what words were available to me and tweaking them until I felt I had made a satisfactory haiku.

moonlight dripping, shines
her precious fire, licks the
surface of your heart

Paint Chip Poetry

This works even more like a game: first, each player draws twelve paint chips from the deck, and then draws a prompt card. Then you use as many of those paint chips as you would like to make a poem that responds to the prompt.

Blackout Bookmarks

In a twist on blackout poetry, we will be trimming our blackout poetry and laminating them to make them into bookmarks. The bookmarks are larger than standard bookmarks, but still a great size for using with even a small paperback book.

When I prep this for the kids, I grab a few of my favorite middle grade novels and photocopy a few pages from each. I look for pages with a lot of dense paragraphs and rich diction. I always try to encourage kids to scan the page and simply circle a few words that jump out at them. Just make connections, and you don't have to find a relevant word or phrase on every line.

Once they've done their circling in pencil, and tweaked it until they feel they'll have a strong poem, they are ready for the black markers!

Here's my sample. I was so jazzed to find a page that had lots of references to books, stories, and even a library! (This was page 394 from Marvels by Brian Selznick.)

Kids will be moving from one station to the next. I don't have a room with tables to work with tomorrow but we'll use clip boards and try to make it comfortable. I hope the kids have as much fun with this stuff as I did!

Spanish Chapter Books for Elementary School Kids

I recently got an email from a parent who was looking for some Spanish chapter books for her daughter who is in 4th grade and has to do three book reports this year on Spanish books. I often get requests like this from parents whose kids are in our wonderful dual-immersion Spanish schools at PUSD. As I was compiling my response, I thought it might be worth sharing for other people whose kids are in upper elementary school and able to read in Spanish.

We do have a lot of Spanish chapter books. Many of our most popular English series are available in Spanish translations. The ones that might work best for a fourth grader are the Clementine/Clementina books by Sarah Pennypacker or the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary, or some of Roald Dahl’s books (such as Fantastic Mr. Fox/El Superzorro). We also have Geronimo Stilton books in Spanish (originally Italian).

But I also want to recommend a few authentic Spanish-only chapter books a fourth grader might enjoy. These have been published in Spanish-speaking countries like Spain, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina.

¡Zoé es lo más! – from the La Banda de Zoé series by Ana García-Siñeríz and Jordi Labanda -- Zoe runs for class president

¡Esta casa es mía! – by Ana Maria Machado. A family builds a house by the beach and has to learn how to share the environment with the animals that were already there.

The Candela series by Mónica Rodriguez – A funny, goofy superspy who goes around the world and even to different times and learns things about history

The Rino Detective series by Pilar Lozano Carbayo and Alejandro Rodríguez – A very richly illustrated detective series with a rhino that solves mysteries

The Mondragó series by Ana Galán – Another very nicely illustrated chapter book series, this one is fantasy/adventure about a dragon who can’t fly

El secreto del escritor fabuloso by Jordi Sierra i Fabra – A magical and mysterious story about the nature of stories—a boy moves in next door to a writer and starts spying on him.

Jordi Sierra i Fabra has a lot of horror books similar to Goosebumps, so maybe when she’s a little bit older she might enjoy those too.

The Benefits of Introducing Kids to Published Authors

Over the past few years of teaching and facilitating writing workshops for kids, I've noticed there are two kinds of young writers: the underconfident, and the overconfident. This is totally normal. Children lack perspective. (Even adults sometimes lack perspective!) Children often have difficulty imagining that the way they write now is not the way they will write always, and that the older they get and the more they practice, the more their writing is going to change.

(Personally, I was the overconfident type--I was the kid who was sending my handwritten manuscripts to Big 5 publishers and couldn't imagine why they wouldn't publish them! I may not have struggled with getting words on paper, but that didn't mean I was ready, and it was sometimes hard for me to see what improvement was needed. I didn't know any published authors, so I had no way of knowing what the road ahead would look like.)

Amazingly, for BOTH types of young writers, the same approach can work wonders: introduce them to someone who has lived longer and accomplished more, and let her tell them about the changes she had to make along the way.

This is why it's so vital to me in my work as a librarian to not only make a case for kids reading lots of books, but for meeting lots of authors. I do my best to bring published authors to the library at least a few times a year (given budget restraints). It's important to me that kids get moments like this, when they got to see author Kristen Kittscher describe the hardest thing she had to learn as a writer, and how learning this improved her plots.




Then she gave kids an effective, simple formula for crafting better plots:

What if...
And then...
However...
So...

You can read more about her plot exercise and view photos and videos of Kristen and the kids at Pasadena Public Library's Kids Blog.

And if you don't have the resources to be able to hire authors to visit your classes, that doesn't have to stop you from bringing authors to your library or school! Many authors are willing to skype with classes, or do chat interviews or Q&As. Ask around and find out what authors live in your area, and start there. Kristen Kittscher is a longtime Pasadena resident, so we lucked out there!

Using Great Books to Teach Writing Great Hooks

At my Kids' Writing Workshop yesterday, I updated a lesson I created a few years ago about writing engaging beginnings. I combed through the upper middle grade books at our library and looked through all of my favorites, seeing if the first line was something I would hold up as an example of a great "hook."

 You'll notice the selection of books is very eclectic. It's something I try to keep in mind when planning workshops for kids who have all different reading interests.

Not all good books have a gripping first line, but of the ones that do, I found a lot of patterns. I grouped these into five categories:

1. Give the Reader a Sense of Urgency and Danger (Adventure, Thriller)

The house is falling in. 

The house is falling in and Danny is falling, knees and elbows crumpling onto the floor, and an earsplitting crash is tearing through the air—that’s surely the roof, breaking in two, about to come pelting down on top of him.

--The Bookof Storms by Ruth Hatfield

2. Tug on the Reader’s Heart Strings (Sympathy, often for poverty or loss, often sad)

            It was fun at first, playing house.

            I made all my own meals.  Crackers and cheese, three times a day.

                        --Love,Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur

            Wilhelmina knew that there were some houses that had glass in every window and locks on the doors. 

            The farmhouse in which she lived was not one of them.

                        --Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms by Katherine Rundell

3. Make the Reader Scratch His Head (Humor, Strangeness, Mystery)

            On the morning I was scheduled to die, a large barefoot man with a bushy red beard waddled past my house.  The thirty-degree temperature didn’t seem to bother him, but he must have had a lousy breakfast, because he let out a burp as loud as a tuba. 

            Belching barefoot giants who look like Vikings are not normal in Belleville, Indiana.  But I didn’t really get a chance to see the guy closely.

            At that moment, I, Jack McKinley, was under attack in my own bedroom.  By a flying reptile.

--The Colossus Rises by Peter Lerangis

How five crows managed to lift a twenty-pound baby boy into the air was beyond Prue, but that was certainly the least of her worries.  In fact, if she were to list her worries right then and there as she sat spellbound on the park bench and watched her little brother, Mac, carried aloft in the talons of these five black crows, puzzling out just how this feat was being done would likely come in dead last.  First on the list: Her baby brother, her responsibility, was being abducted by birds.  A close second: What did they plan on doing with him?

--Wildwood by Colin Meloy

4. Speak to the Reader Like a Trusted Friend (Narrative voice, Show the reader who you are)

            We only have a few hours, so listen carefully.

            If you’re hearing this story, you’re already in danger.  Sadie and I might be your only chance.

                        --TheRed Pyramid by Rick Riordan

            My name is Charlie Joe Jackson, and I hate reading.  And if you’re reading this book, you hate reading, too. 

            In fact, you do whatever you can to avoid reading, and the fact that you’re holding a book in your hand right now is kind of shocking.

            I know exactly how you feel; I’m one of you.

            Just remember: you are not alone.  We’ll get through this together.

--Charlie Joe Jackson’s Guide to Not Reading by Tommy Greenwald       

            All I’ve ever wanted is for Juli Baker to leave me alone.  For her to back off—you know, just give me some space.

                        --Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen

5. Set the Scene (Not Just The Setting! Tie it to plot, themes, meaning of book)

            There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.  There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas.  That was over a hundred years ago.  Now it is just a dry, flat wasteland.

--Holes by Louis Sachar

            The fjord is freezing over. I watch it from the edge of the cliff near our hall, and each day the ice claims more of the narrow winding of ocean. It squeezes out the waves and the blue-black water, while it squeezes us in. Just as Father intended it to. Winter is here to wall us up, to bury us in snow and keep us safe.

                        --Icefall by Matthew J. Kirby

After we read these excerpts and talked about each writing style, I read selections from five other middle grade books and asked the kids which category each one would fall under:

• The Tiara on the Terrace by Kristen Kittscher
• Crispin: The Cross of Lead by Avi
• Crenshaw by Katherine Applegate
• The Name of This Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch
• A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd

The kids really got into analyzing these opening lines for what kind of opening they represented. I love it when I see kids realize there are principles and theories that they can apply to their own writing.

Then we did an activity: the kids had to write two different openings to a story, and their peers voted on which one they liked better by holding up "A" or "B." I find that the method of having everyone vote on their favorite version is a kind and encouraging way of giving kids feedback on which piece was the most effective. The kids read their pieces aloud. We all guessed what kind of opening they wrote (1, 2, 3, 4 or 5) and then we voted which ones we liked best.

Here's a photo from when I did this a few years ago:

The other thing I like about this is that they can see that different people respond to different things. It's all very subjective, and that's how writing is.

I encouraged everyone to read The Tiara on the Terrace or The Wig in the Window by Kristen Kittscher, because she's going to be our guest instructor for our next workshop! I told the kids that I would have a prize for whoever asked Kristen the best question, and then they rushed to grab the library copies of her books.