Working with a budding writer at WordSparks Camp.

Cut, paste, write!

July 28, 2013Leave a comment

Salem Times Register intern Stephanie Floyd just posted on Facebook some of the photos she took at WordSparks on Tuesday. With her permission, I am posting them here. For our collage project, we made word/image collages with a center word and four corner words. After creating sentences that connected the central word with the corner words, we used those sentences as the springboard for a story. When we didn’t know where to go in our stories, we let the pictures guide us to our next idea.

All photos below are the property of Stephanie Floyd / Salem Times Register. Here we are working on our collages, reading our stories, and playing some games.

Bleach T-shirts / WordSparks

July 25, 2013July 15, 2014Leave a comment

I was too busy helping with the bleach t-shirts we made the last day of WordSparks Camp to take many pictures, but I do have a few. They turned out pretty well (this was a first run for me, so I was a bit uncertain) and I thought the kids did a great job coming up with a quotation or slogan for their shirts.

Other quotes / slogans include:
“Right or wrong? Choose write!”
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
“Stupid is as stupid does.”
“Write is to write as awesome is to awesome.”
“Metaphor… it’s like a simile.”
“Star Wars: The Writers Strike Back”

I wanted to add a few tips about making bleach t-shirts for posterity’s sake.

Basic instructions:

Put something inside your shirt to keep the bleach from bleeding to the other side. Cardboard covered with wax paper is often suggested, but I didn’t have any wax paper, so I improvised. I found that plastic cutting boards work really well. Pizza boxes also work. Whatever’s flat and thick enough will do it.

You can draw your design on the shirt first with a washable marker or chalk. I did some freehand, though, and it worked fine.

When you’re ready, use the bleach pen to draw your design on the shirt. Let the bleach sit for about 15 minutes (depends on how white you want the design to be). Rinse the bleach off with cool water. Wash and dry (or just dry — your choice).

Is the big container of bleach gel that you can get for laundry made of the same stuff as bleach gel pens?
N0! It is not. The bleach gel pens have a much thicker fluid in them. I tried pouring bleach gel from the big container into some pointy squeeze bottles, but it did not work at all. I did find a recipe for make-your-own bleach gel (linked here), but I didn’t have time to give it a try. So I just went with the pens.

Write big! The bleach spreads out a bit, so if you don’t give your lines enough room, you’ll end up with a blob instead of a letter.

Rinse with care! Whatever you decide to put inside the shirt to keep the bleach from spreading, LEAVE IT IN WHEN YOU RINSE THE SHIRT. That way, you will avoid the shirt crumpling on itself and bleach getting on parts of your shirt you don’t intend for bleach to be on.

I used this as inspiration:

Self-portraits / WordSparks

July 24, 2013September 2, 20132 Comments

I had a great time making self-portraits with the WordSparks kids last week–both in art and poetry.

Ok, that last one wasn’t a camper. He’s my cutie-patootie toddler whose portrait my daughter colored… but how could I leave him out?

After we worked on our self-portraits, we wrote some “I AM” poems.

I’ll include a few here (some transcribed, and some in their handwritten form):

I AM ~ Laura Voros

I am a nose of a hound.
I am an eye of an eagle.
I am the howl of the wolf.
I am the ear of a fox.
I am the leg of a cheetah.
I am the teeth of the lion.
I am the knowledge of the world.
I am the moon.
I am the sun.
I am Mother Nature.

I AM ~ Zachary Schultz

I am the sun that shines on your house. I am your house. I am the painting in your house. I am your bed that the painting hangs over. I am the dog that lays in your bed. I am the collar on your dog. I am the tick that hides under your dog’s collar. I am your son that gets rid of the tick that hides under your dog’s collar. I am your son’s favorite amusement park. I am your son’s favorite ride at the amusement park.

I AM ~ Caleb Ching

I AM ~ Elizabeth Bourlakas

I AM ~ Sarah Scultz

And just a few more photos from the day:

If you’re interested in making similar portraits or self-portraits or writing I AM poems, here’s some info.

Portrait Instructions:

First I took photos of the kids standing against a white wall (as I didn’t want the background to be too distracting).

I opened the photos in the regular Windows Photoviewer program (from Windows 7… I have Windows 8, but I loaded the older photoviewer program on my computer, as I like it better). Then I made them grayscale (which is one of the “effects” that come up on the bar at the top of the photoviewer) and cropped them into a square. I save those files under a new name.

I reopened the new files in GIMP (which is a program similar to Photoshop, but unlike Photoshop, it can be downloaded for free). In Gimp, I chose “Filters” and then “Artistic” and then “Photocopy.” (You used to be able to do this project using an actual photocopy machine, but now they are all too fancy and the photos just look like photos– which is not the desired effect for this project.)

I just played with the setting that popped up until I got the desired result (which is something like a coloring book outline of a face).

For example, for this photo, I used
MASK RADIUS 23.03
SHARPNESS .530
PERCENT BLACK .461
PERCENT WHITE . 061

Then you have to export the photo to make it a jpg so it will print. In GIMP, go under “File” and choose “Export.” Then replace “xcf” in the title line with “jpg” after the period.

Then just print, cut, and let the kids color. We used oil pastels, markers, and colored pencils. As you can see from the examples above, each has a different effect.

For the I AM poems, I just told the kids to think metaphorically (we talked a while about metaphor and I gave them examples off the top of my head), think about shifting parts of speech (so they wouldn’t just use adjectives, but nouns and verbs and whatnot), be wild, have fun–and most importantly, not to worry about making sense!

Oh yeah, also I told them to write at least 10 lines, each beginning with “I am.” :)

Where Did the Green Man Come From? / WordSparks

July 23, 2013July 25, 2013Leave a comment

Green girl power!

Here’s the second in a series of posts about last week’s WordSparks Creative Writing Camp at the Salem Museum. I was genuinely thrilled to see these young people enjoying the fun of live drama as they gathered materials for their Green Man (and Woman) Masks and created an origin story for the mysterious Green Man seen for centuries in art and architecture. The kids came up with fantastic stories about how the green folk turned green! I’ll let the pictures talk for themselves.

Plotting out the play

Good idea!

What a smile!

Ready to go!

The audience awaits…

Wait a minute! We’re still working!

Follow the leader!

The play begins!

The boys plot their play

Action!

Tada!

The afternoon group gathers greens

Nice!

Collecting from the garden

… and more collecting

So lovely!

Howard and Kaylan

Bagged!

Making the masks…

At work!

Yes?

Rainbow eyes!

The team

Magnetic Poetry / WordSparks

July 22, 2013July 25, 2013Leave a comment

I just finished up leading WordSparks Creative Writing Camp, so this week I’ll be sharing some pics and tid-bits from the camp. It was a great experience; I made some new friends and had a blast sharing writing with young people in my community. Who could ask for more?!

Monday: I didn’t take many photos on Monday since we were all just getting to know one another–and nothing quite says “eek!” like having a camera put in your face by an unfamiliar adult. That said, we got to know each other pretty quickly. We played some games, made some art, read some poetry together and wrote some of our own.

Isabelle leads the morning group in an ice-breaker game

From Monday’s “Six Ways of Seeing” exercise. A camper brought her finished work (six visions of an old-time radio) back the next day. Later we read Wallace Steven’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and wrote our own “Seeing Again” stories and poems.

Tuesday: We had fun with collage, blackout poem, and magnetic poetry. Here are some of the magnetic poems we came up with. (I haven’t credited these, as some were written in groups and some by individuals, and I didn’t want to leave anyone out by accident. I’m halfway sure, though, that the first two come from Caleb, the third is by Harrison and Howard, and the last one from Laura.)

I love the enthusiasm of these two. Managers everywhere would do well to keep these in mind:

Love the surprise at the end:

Oooh, dark! Also, why more than one heart? Intriguing!

This one is so wise… beautiful!

Check us out later this week for more about the week at WordSparks, including Green Man and Woman masks, self-portraits, and bleach t-shirts.

Life in a Box / Pictures from the Asylum

July 9, 2013July 25, 2013Leave a comment

There was a popular trend in museums a few years back to make traveling “trunk” exhibits that could be checked out by schools or other groups. The idea of a museum-in-a-box was to bring some educational programing of the museum to people (usually children) who might not be able (or inclined) to visit otherwise–and to do it the way museums do best, through objects.

Jon Crispin‘s work photographing the 400 suitcases left in the attic of a New York insane asylum from 1910 to 1960 is perhaps more like life-in-a-box. The cases include the expected items a person might need when leaving home for a few months: family photos, toothbrushes, a sewing kit. Then there are the unusual, telling tidbits: the paperweight from the 1893 Chicago Worlds Fair, a set of yellow and white checkered drinking glasses, a miniature souvenir bat, a silver soup spoon, silk flowers, a World War II uniform. One man brought his zither.

Crispin’s photos are sparse, haunting tableaux of lives interrupted. The average stay in New York’s Willard Asylum was 30 years. “Looking at these suitcases, you just get the idea that that these people really had lives outside before they went to Willard,” says Crispin.

Green Man (and Woman!) Masks

July 8, 2013July 28, 2013Leave a comment

(photo copyright Mary Crockett)

I’m gearing up for leading WordSparks Creative Writing Camp next week, so I’m getting my kids busy trying out a few of the projects I’ve planned. The first one we tried out is the Green Man (or Woman) Mask.

Basically, the Green Man is a leafy-faced dude who has appeared in art and architecture since ancient times. He looks like this:

(Green Man photos courtesy of Wikimedai Commons. First image by Johannes Otto Först, second and third by Simon Garbutt.)

The idea for the craft is to gather natural materials from the gardens and park surrounding the museum to use in a Green Man or Green Woman mask. Then we’ll write a mask poem… or mask story for the prose inclined.

As I got my kids to make some prototypes, here are a few things I’ve learned:

1. There is no “wrong” way to do this (at least by my standards).

2. Glue-gun glue is HOT!

3. When you go outside with a big basket and start throwing in lots of leaves, flowers, twigs, grass, etc., and them come back in and dump it all on your kitchen table, you can expect to find tiny bugs on and around your kitchen table for quite a while.

3. My baby makes a super cute Green Man.