A note from William
Congratulations to Abhi Sukhdial, winner of last year’s Stone Soup Book Contest. His book, Three Days Till EOC, has been nominated for Cybils Awards (Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards). Read his great book! Support a young author. Buy a copy at our Stone Soup Store.
I would like to call your attention to the new Stone Soup design. We implemented a revised home page a few weeks ago, and now you will find a completely revised navigation system and design for the interior pages. The Refugee Project portal has been designed and will soon be implemented. Please check out the new design. Many thanks to Carlos, Carly, Daniel, Ravi, and the entire staff of c2cg for their patience and the quality of their work.
Annual Drive
I will try to mostly keep the Annual Drive correspondence in separate emails so that the newsletter remains appropriate for our young readers. I do want to say, however, that we absolutely need more of you to contribute to our Annual Drive than ever before or we will not be able to continue.
The simplest, easiest way you can help us—and a way that costs you nothing—is to order through the AmazonSmile program. You will see where you choose your charity. Our official name with the IRS is Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup. Type that in and then accept that we are the charity you want to help and then 0.5% of what you spend will be given to us. It uses the same password as your regular Amazon account. Your orders, wish lists, and etc. will all be there. It takes a little getting used to to go to the smile.amazon.com site every time you buy (even for me), but Amazon will sometimes remind you to go there.
In the spirit of Stone Soup, every little bit each of you contributes adds up. At half a percent, it does take a lot of you to make a difference. If Stone Soup is important to you, then please make the effort to do your holiday shopping through the AmazonSmile site. Thank you.
Art project
Shattered Landscape. What an interesting photograph.
Cubism is the modern art movement that worked with shattered perspectives. This image is of Pablo Picasso’s 1910 Girl with a Mandolin:
You can read about cubism on Wikipedia and look at cubist works or art online.
For the project this weekend, I think most of you will want to work with your camera. By using mirrors, reflections in glasses, windows, and polished surfaces, create a photograph that explores illusion, broken perspectives, and dreamlike visions. As always, if you like what you create, please send it to Stone Soup so editor Emma Wood can consider it for publication.
Stay safe!
Until next week,
Congratulations to our November Flash Contest Winners
Flash Contest #25: Write a Story that begins with “Once upon a time in a land far away . . .” and ends with “. . . and they all lived happily ever after.”
What a difficult task we had judging these entries! We could see that all our entrants had fun with the idea of playing with and subverting the fairytale form, and we loved reading the range of imaginative journeys everyone took. While we enjoyed many stories involving the more traditional witches, royalty, dragons and other magical creatures (not necessarily in traditional mode, though!), we also encountered aliens and were transported into outer space—and even entered the mind of a roll of toilet paper (look out for that one, plus one other, on the COVID-19 blog)! A huge thank you and a hearty well done to everyone who wrote a piece and submitted it to us.
In particular, we congratulate our honorable mentions and our winners, whose work you can appreciate on the Stone Soup website.
Winners
The Alien by Benjamin Fraenkel, 8, Mansonville, Quebec, Canada
The Queen and the Tiara by Samantha Lee, 11, Thomaston, CT
The Bookcase by Iago Macknik-Conde, 13, Brooklyn, NY
The State of Matter by Maya Mourshed, 8, Silver Spring, MD
The Forest of Mystery by Areesha Nouman, 12, Westlake, OH
Honorable Mentions
Happily Ever After by Isabella Bixler, 13, Fairview Park, OH
The Witch’s Journey by Lorena Manrique, 11, Fort Worth, TX
Dragon Tales by Georgia Grace Hoover, 11, Forth Worth, TX
The Naughty Princess by Atalie Lyda, 11, Portland, OR
My True Self by Michelle Peng, 10, Scarsdale, NY
Selected for the Stone Soup Blog
Pecky’s Bravery Saves the Forest by Elise Cheung, 8, Danville, CA
The Toilet Paper Roll’s Quest by Charlotte Zhang, 12, Portland, OR
Highlights from the past week online
Don't miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com!
Salma, 11, writes a poem on the powerful feeling of loneliness and how we have to fight against it during the pandemic.
Aarush reviewed Roald Dahl’s autobiography, Going Solo, on the blog. Read why Aarush thought the book was “easy to connect to” and a “page-turner.”
Rex, 10, read quite a few books for the Oregon Battle of the Books, but was particularly struck by Out of Left Field by Ellen Klages. Check out Rex’s review to learn more about the book.
Trevor, one of our new bloggers, wrote an exciting blog post titled “Aiming High” about a rock climber.
Chino, CA
From Stone Soup
November 2020
Regrets and Broken Gas Pumps
By Sydney Burr, 13 (Chino, CA)
I’m pumping gas in the summer sun but the only gallons I can think about are the gallons of sweat that I’m sweating although it doesn’t make a difference anyhow and there are no good movies out and the flock in the sky has wandered to float far away above the mountains so there’s nothing to stop anyone from frying an egg or themselves on the sidewalk. The dull lifeless hot air is not stimulated until a breeze awakens but the breeze is even hotter and the skating rink is closed for refurbishment and the darned pump isn’t working so I collapse into the driver’s seat and pull forward to try the next pump which I don’t think is encouraged but I’m too hot to think. The blue of the sky is a hazy blue because of the smog and I’d get an electric car because I don’t want to contribute to the pollution or keep dealing with this pump which isn’t working either but I can’t afford one and I can’t afford Disneyland but I couldn’t really send Anna there anyway in this heat plus there’s no one to send her there with either.
Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered
in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498.
Stone Soup's Advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.
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