“Experiments in Reduction” by Caitlin Goh, 13 (Dallas, TX) Published in the April 2020 issue of Stone Soup A note from Sarah Things are difficult and overwhelming right now, but I want to take the time to highlight some really excellent initiatives happening online that you can enjoy. Did you know that the author Kelly Yang is holding writing workshops on Instagram Live every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 12 p.m. PDT? Kelly Yang wrote the critically acclaimed Front Desk, which was reviewed on our blog. Also, Library of Congress Ambassador of Literature Jason Reynolds has been creating great videos with prompts for young writers. Here is where you can find the videos for his series, Write. Right. Rite. We’ve never featured reviews of Jason Reynolds’s books on our blog, but we would love to! If you’ve read one, consider writing a review and submitting it to us LeVar Burton, who you might know from the show Reading Rainbow, is going live on Twitter reading books three times a week. He’s reading children’s books Mondays at 9 a.m. PDT and young adult books on Wednesdays at 3 p.m. PDT. It’s not just authors, though. Museums are also offering more online for people at home. The Museum of Modern Art has started Virtual Views every Thursday, where they highlight one of their exhibits with commentary from museum curators and more. And you can explore famous museums like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from the comfort of home. And that’s just to name a few! Other arts organizations are also doing exciting things. I tuned into my friend’s theater company doing a Facebook Live reading of the Shakespeare play Much Ado About Nothing (each actor at their own home!) and really enjoyed it. Also, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is streaming weekly concerts on Fridays for free. Getting back to more mainstream–but still great!–providers or inspiration and tools, there is a really great list of links to free Learning at Home resources being provided at this time by lots of major publishers–including Stone Soup–on the Copyright Clearance Center’s website. Plus, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention all of the things that Stone Soup is doing at this time. We’re holding Book Club on Wednesdays and Writing Workshop on Fridays. Check out an update from our book club here. And read what participants have created during writing workshop for our first meeting here, our second meeting here, and our third meeting here Are there other cultural events happening online that you’d like the Stone Soup community to know about? Email me at sarah@stonesoup.com and we’ll start a page with a list of resources. We hope that some of these can make your time at home a little brighter. Until next week, Weekly Flash Contest #3: Winners The week commencing April 13 was a very special week for our Daily Creativity series. We had a takeover by one of our readers, Molly Torinus, age 11, from Middleton, WI! Molly is a volunteer in our COVID-19 Focus Group, and she wrote a whole series of terrific writing prompts for us. When we planned her takeover, we all agreed that this prompt, challenging everyone to write from the point of view of an animal (Daily Creativity prompt #16), would be a great one to set as the contest. You all seemed to think so too, as we had a record number of entries! We were thrilled that Molly also joined the Stone Soup team to be one of this week’s judges. Once the contest closed at the end of last week, we all read the entries independently and gave them our own scores. Then, we put the three judges’ scores together to come up with a shortlist and had a Zoom meeting to discuss it and agree the final results. It’s the first time we have had a reader judge in one of our contests, so it was very exciting for us to work with Molly on the contest: we can tell you that she was a very thoughtful and fair judge, and we really enjoyed working with her on this contest. We will try to get readers involved again in future, so look out for another takeover soon! We all very much enjoyed reading these entries, and we were impressed by the different ways people approached the challenge of thinking like an animal. We especially loved the entries that really sounded like the thoughts and behaviors of animals we have met. It was easy to agree on our top contestants, and we also wanted to honor some of the other entries, as there were so many good ones. So this week we are announcing our five winners, whose work is published here, plus four honorable mentions. Congratulations to all of them, and thank you, Molly, for a great writing challenge and a fantastic job as a judge! Winners, in alphabetical order: Yutia Li, 10, Houston, TX Anna Rosini, 12, Arlington, VA Audrey Tzeng, 11, Rocklin, CA Ella Yamamura, 12, Cary, NC Sophie Yu, 12, Houston, TX Honorable Mentions: “Chickens and Playtime” by Nora Heiskell, 12, Philadelphia, PA “Piano Bunny” by Maya Mourshed, 8, Silver Spring, MD “The Great Indoors” by Enni Harlan, 13, Los Angeles, CA “A Good Summer Day: A Day in the Life of Moti” by Anushka Trivedi, 9, Silver Spring, MD Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! We posted another art piece by Sloka, 11, related to the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows how families have been separated because of the risk of contagion. Audrey, 11, wrote a poem that captures the anxiety she feels about the coronavirus and the inescapable news coverage of it. Daniel, 10, writes about what he learned about the scientists who created the atomic bomb in the book Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin. Though proud of their invention’s success, many of the scientists felt overwhelming guilt. We posted a short, humorous comic strip by Abhi, 12. Are there parts of the self-isolating lifestyle that
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
This Invisible Wall, a poem by Ishan Kelkar, 10
This Invisible Wall By Ishan Kelkar, 10 This invisible wall Makes people sick Traps people in their homes only leaving for essentials This invisible wall strips toilet paper from shelves People stock their pantries with fear Because of this invisible wall My puppy keeps us company Because this invisible wall keeps me and my friends at home We zoom but we don’t play tag The super highway is crowded but there are no cars on the road When we see my mom come home from work at the hospital She can’t hug us at the door There’s an invisible wall in between us We can break down this wall brick by brick together By being apart Ishan Kelkar, 10 Needham, MA
Thankfulness: a review of “Where the Mountain Meets the Moon” by Grace Lin, by Daniel Zhu, 10
I have heard the following thought experiment countless times, albeit from different people: you can save your family (including you), or you can save everyone but your family (with the exception of you). Hard choices like this, although usually not as dramatic, often draw out one’s true personality. In the book Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin, the main character, Minli, and her friend Dragon are trying to change both their fortunes by visiting the Old Man of the Moon; a mythological figure who is said to control the fate of all humans. However, when she discovers that she can only have one question and one answer, Minli is forced to make a choice: she can either change her own fortune, or she can change that of one of her closest friends. Minli and Dragon both didn’t have very good fortunes. Minli’s village never saw any rain, so farming was extremely hard; the villagers barely got by in everyday life. Dragon was a little more lucky – he was a dragon, after all – but for some reason unbeknownst to him, he couldn’t fly like other dragons could. Both wished to change the bad conditions they felt they were living in. When they finally get to the Old Man of the Moon, however, he delivers some grave news: Minli can only ask one question. Now Minli is faced with a choice: she can either change her own fortune, or Dragon’s. Although this was forshadowed when Dragon found that the bridge to the Old Man of the Moon could not hold her weight–only Minli’s–it still came as a shock to her when the Old Man of the Moon revealed the grim truth. However, Minli suddenly remembers the words of her friends Da-Fu and A-Fu: “Why would we want to change our fortune?” Then she sees the legendary paper which supposedly held the secret to happiness: and it read “thankfulness.” She realizes that perhaps why Da-Fu and A-Fu didn’t want to change their fortune was because they were already satisfied with everything they had; they didn’t need more. Minli finds herself thinking that perhaps her fortune doesn’t need to be changed either. So, without doubt or hesitance, she asks the Old Man of the Moon, “Why can’t Dragon fly?” It turns out, the pearl on top of Dragon’s head was somehow weighing him down. Minli pulled it off his head, and together, they flew home. Coincidentally, Minli’s father had told her mother a story about a dragon pearl, so the next morning, they were shocked that Minli actually came home with one. And then, after their happy reunion, the villagers’ lives took an even better turn when the Fruitless Mountain started blossoming again. Why? Well, a story that people once thought was just a legend said that a dragon called the Jade Dragon was the master of all rain. However, when her children sacrificed themselves because Jade Dragon was being cruel and holding grudges, she was filled with grief and descended to the ground as a river, hoping to reunite with one of her children. However, this never happened, which is why Fruitless Mountain remained fruitless; it had been cursed by Jade Dragon. Long story short, it turned out that Dragon was one of Jade Dragon’s children, and since he had been reunited with one of his children, the curse on the Fruitless Mountain was lifted. Minli’s village began to prosper again, and after her parents sold the dragon pearl to a king–The Guardian of the City of the Bright Moonlight, to be exact–the village was able to get the material it needed to properly farm. Minli thought to herself, “I had not asked the Old Man of the Moon any of my questions; yet, they have all been answered.” I’m sure that if Minli had asked her question, the Old Man of the Moon would have told her to be thankful. When we make choices, it shows a lot about us. One of my favorite trilogies, Divergent, centers on this topic. At the top of every book, there’s a catchphrase that relates to choices, and on the cover of the last book, Allegiant, the words written on it are: “One choice will define you.” And it will– this is demonstrated in Minli’s story. When Minli chose to ask Dragon’s question instead of her own, she demonstrated that she had attained arguably one of the most important virtues in everyday life: thankfulness. If you had truly mastered this virtue: you could make a choice when asked thought experiment questions in a second. For example, the thought experiment at the beginning: if you were truly thankful, you would be satisfied with how you had lived your life, and you wouldn’t want more. So, you would obviously go with the second choice. This not only demonstrates the importance of thankfulness in itself, it also shows that thankfulness is a crucial part of making good choices: one of the most important skills to master in life. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin. New York: Little Brown Young Readers, 2009.
