Dear families and teachers,
Story Lab launched its first after school sessions for elementary, middle, and high school students with a nighttime exploration of the Tongass, haikus, and “Frankenwords.”
Last week, our elementary school students learned about description. In one activity, Storytellers were asked to close their eyes and imagine themselves on a wilderness expedition. As they reached for their flashlights, our Storytellers instead encountered a series of mystery objects, and described them to the group using the four senses writers tend to overlook. We ended by reading the first chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory together to think about how Dahl uses description to paint a portrait of Charlie’s family.
At our first session, middle school students learned about portmanteaus, words that phonetically blend two words (such as “smog,” which derive from smoke and fog). We called them “Frankenwords,” which we spontaneously generated and combined randomly to create our own. Then we invented definitions for our Frankenwords and wrote “origin stories” about how the words came to be. Isabel picked “skoffe,” which is “crushed up pieces of skulls in coffee,” and Alex chose “cour,” which is a “couch car” developed by a man who placed a couch atop a lawn mower to move around.
This week, middle school students used the concept of origin stories to begin to learn about mythology. We read the myth of Arachne, which tells how spiders came to be, and analyzed what made it a myth. Then we invented myths of our own inspired by class-generated words and verbs. Bo received the words “wolf” and “eating,” which inspired a story called “How the Wolf Got its Eating.”
At our first session, high school students wrote haikus about evocative moments, both real and imagined. At the beginning of class, we gave them prompts (for example, “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?”) but didn’t tell them what they were for. We reviewed the basics of haiku-writing and wrote haikus based on our answers to the prompts. Katie wrote:
A peaceful puddle
rain drops rest on its surface
reflecting the wind.
This week, high school students began to learn about magical realism. We warmed up our brains by writing poems in the form of zany questions, inspired by Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions. Skylar, for example, wrote, “Is the color green envious of a sadder shade of blue?” Then we read Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” to come up with a definition of magical realism.
We encourage all Story Lab students to send their haikus to the Island Institute! We are collecting one hundred haikus by Sitkans to publish a book of one million haikus. For more information, contact us at 747-3794 or peter@iialaska.org.
Story Lab hosts free, after-school creative writing and storytelling classes to students ages 7-19. Elementary school sessions meet every other Tuesday 3:00-4:30, middle school every Wednesday 3:30-5:00, and high school every Thursday 4:15-5:30. For questions, contact the number above or sarah@iialaska.org.