This is a video of an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the the publication of “A Wrinkle in Time.” Children, as well as adults, are interviewed. A good introductory video to show before assigning the book. Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) is an American author who wrote A Wrinkle in Time, a Newberry-Award-winning book that has so far sold eight million copies. At the time her death, A Wrinkle in Time was in its 67th printing! You’d think that such a wonderful and loved book would have been snapped up by the first publisher who received the manuscript. But it was not. A Wrinkle in Time is a famous book that almost didn’t find a publisher—much like Harry Potter! Madeleine’s manuscript was rejected by 26 publishers before being accepted by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1963. As a writer, Madeleine worked hard, and didn’t give up. As Madeleine L’Engle is no longer living, her social media accounts are managed by others. That said, the official website, Facebook, and Twitter accounts are worth consulting. Madeleine L’Engle at Wikipedia The official Website The official Facebook account. The official Twitter account. This account is mostly quotes from Madeleine L’Egnle. It is worth consulting. This the transcript of an interview with Madeleine L’Engle conducted by children and published by Scholastic Book. Books by Madeleine L’Engle [columns_row margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px”] [column size=”one_half” last=”no”] [/column] [column size=”one_half” last=”yes”] The Wrinkle in Time graphic novel adapted by Hope Larson. [/column] [/columns_row]
Homeschooling
Sarah Kay, Poet and Storyteller: TEDxEast Talk on Writing
Sarah Kay (born 1988) is an American poet who began performing poetry at age 14. Sarah Kay specializes in spoken-word poetry. The performance aspect of her work is clear in all of her videos. To start getting to know Sarah Kay’s work and philosophy, watch her TEDxEast talk above, titled “How Many Lives Can You Live?”. If you find the depth that I do in this talk, visit Sara Kay’s website for access to a substantial number of her performances. Poetry was long performed more than it was written down. Performance is still a central tradition for poets in a way that reading prose is not for prose writers. Spoken-word poetry is, as Sarah explains, a combination of theater and poetry that cannot really be pinned to a page. As she is young and started performing poetry at age 14, she is a poet many of your students will be able to relate to. If you already have, or are thinking of having, a poetry stage in your classroom or school, Sarah’s work ought to help you. This is a rich, deep, well performed talk about writing. It is about writing and life and how you can use writing to experience lives that you, yourself, will never live. At the core of the greatest stories in Western literature — for example, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert; Moby Dick, by Herman Melville; Othello, by William Shakespeare; Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner; The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison — is the author’s skill in bringing characters who are completely different from each other (and from the author) into being. Whether you are a young writer or a teacher of young writers, listen to Sarah Kay’s TEDxEast talk. I know teachers will find many ideas that will fit into and enrich your current writing program. This is a piece you will want to visit many times. By way of introduction to Sarah Kay’s childhood and development as a poet, in particular the importance of her elementary education, watch this second talk below. She effortlessly glides from a standard kind of presentation to a gossamer glittering shockingly vivid and effortless gorgeous storytelling. She also links her 14-year-old self, when she first started performing poetry, to her 24-year-old self. Many students will find the link between her 8th-grade self and her young-adult self exciting and inspiring.
Writing Activity: Bringing Animal Characters Alive Through Gesture
Taking as inspiration the world of puppeteers for the play “War Horse” this activity teaches students how to use gesture to make animal characters more realistic. This 23-minute TED Talk is about how the puppet horse in the play War Horse is made to feel alive. Animals are common characters in stories written by kids, horses especially. Different authors of stories about animals bring their characters to life in different ways, but one very common way to make an animal character believable as the animal it is declared to be is to have it display behaviors that are characteristic of that animal. In this video we see that the puppeteers who created the horse for War Horse enabled their huge puppet to display several very typical horse behaviors. First, all horses (all animals) breathe. So they gave their puppet the ability to look like it was breathing. Horses can breathe very loudly! When writing a story with a horse character, it can be helpful to remember that at some point the horse may breathe out through loose lips, making that distinctive horsey brrrrrrr sound. Second, anyone who has spent time around a horse knows its ears move in multiple directions and the horse may cup its ears towards a sound to listen, even before it moves its head. In fact, a horse may divide its attention between looking and listening. The puppeteers who created the wooden horse made sure it was able to move its ears in a horse-like way. In writing a story about a horse, the cocking of an ear, the letting out of a loud breath, the flicking of a tail, a pawing gesture of a front leg — these are the kinds of horse-like behaviors that can imbue a horse character with the sense of reality that strengthens the character in the story, making it more believable. Yes! It really is a stallion! The ideas for making puppets explained in this video can be applied to any animal — dogs, cats, parakeets, rabbits, chickens. A writing project based on the video could be as simple as writing a paragraph in which an animal character moves a short distance — a cat across a room, a horse to the edge of a paddock — but in the process uses one or two movements that are characteristic of that animal. The discussion inspired by the video could expand to include a discussion of gesture as a way to delineate human characters. The nervous laugh, the unconscious brushing back of the hair, a voice that goes up (or down) under stress — these are the gestures that help define each of our personalities. The characters in a story become more believable, more real, when given the occasional dimensionality of real life.
