Dear families and teachers,

Story Lab transported our storytellers to new places in the past two weeks: to a life-sized board game and to Mount Olympus.

Last week, students walked into a room covered in pink, yellow, green, blue, and purple tiles, which formed a winding path.

“In order to advance,” boomed a voice, “you must roll the bright yellow, star-patterned die.”

Students rolled the die and landed on various colored tiles. Each color stood for a style of writing, from “one-sentence stories” to acrostic poems. Once they landed on a tile, they had to write in that tile’s assigned style of writing about a prompt drawn from a cup: for instance, a one-sentence story about a time-traveling cat.

For instance, the Light Warriors (Bo and Rowan from our middle school session), wrote some evocative lines in an ABAB CDCD poem about paper (a form which requires that lines rhyme in that order):

Paper lives in clouds as white as snow.

It fall from the sky like a snowflake

And lays on the ground like a blanket on a toe.

It is as warm as the water in a lake.

 

The waves on the lake moved like paper in the wind.

The waves on the lake lapped up against the white paper trees.

The water sinned.

 

This week, middle school students learned more about Greek mythology from the gods themselves. Gaia and Zeus themselves took over Sarah and Henry’s bodies to teach our storytellers about Greek gods – who they are, what they like to eat and drink, why they mattered to the Greeks. The gods then turned the students into gods themselves! They drank ambrosia, ate red grapes and Oreos, read myths about their randomly assigned gods, reflected on the complexities of their personalities, and imagined new details for the gods. Tava, who became Athena, wrote that if she were an animal, she would be a wolf, since they are wise and sly like her, and began a story about Athena as a wolf.

Then the gods congregated on Mount Olympus and introduced themselves at a council of the gods. In attendance included Artemis, who was once Reagan, Hephaestus, formerly named Bo, Hera, who took over the form of Isabel, and Athena, who came in the human form of Tava. We played icebreaker games and interviewed each other as our gods. Sparks flew between Zeus and Hephaestus, who expressed much resentment towards his father for throwing him off a building.

High school students learned about personal essay writing this week. We warmed up with a rapid free-write on a prompt that asked about students’ beliefs, passions, and memorable life experiences. Then we started to brainstorm other ways of writing about our own lives. We wrote down six different identities for ourselves – from writer to origami-folder – and brainstormed stories related to each of our identities. Then we started writing about those stories, focusing on unexpected connections between moments in our lives. Kristopher, for example, reflected on the way that origami-folding was related to playing video games.

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.