Photo by Bettina Arrigoni via Creative Commons If you’re interested in birds or you read my last post, you might want to birdwatch. It’s pretty easy to get started, but here are a few tips if you get stuck: Just watch. There are birds everywhere. You just have to look outside. There will probably be some birds. If you want to know what kind of birds they are, you can just look it up on the computer or your phone. Some more advanced things to do are using a field guide and notebook. A field guide can be useful if you just want a physical book to read to identify birds instead of a website or app. A notebook can be fun if you want to write down the birds you see. Bird feeders, houses, and baths help you attract birds to your yard. Bird feeders are also fun because lots of birds can come to them, especially in winter when there is less food. Buy some wild bird food, and then make or buy a feeder, or just spread out the food on the ground and wait for the birds! Bird houses are cool and sometimes work. Make sure to get a good one. It’s really fun to see the parents going in and out of it, and you might even see the babies’ first flights! Bird baths are also nice because you can see the birds bathing and it’s really funny, but make sure you clean out the leaves every once in a while. Binoculars are nice to have and help you see close up. It helps for identifying birds in a flock at a feeder, or just birds that are far away. I hope this helps you get started. Good luck and happy birdwatching!
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Saturday Newsletter: February 24, 2018
Turkish Aircraft Bombing Cyprus by Frosoula Papeptrou, age 6. This image was made shortly after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. A note from William Rubel Next week I will be in Israel! Jane Levi, Stone Soup’s Operations Manager and I will be starting a two week adventure testing a theory of David Eitam, an Israeli Archeologist, that the Natufian people (this is the civilization between around 12,500 and 9,500 BCE that started out as hunter gatherers and ended up inventing agriculture) first made bread by processing wild barley in mortars carved into bedrock. One my other Stone Soupcolleagues will write the Newsletter, and I may contribute a little travel section. Stone Soup’s refugee children’s project Last week I mentioned that we would like Stone Soup to become a place where refugee children can find a voice. For me, this week’s featured artwork, by a Greek Cypriot six-year-old, captures the fear and horror of war more powerfully than the news outlets that daily report to us about the brutalities of arial bombardment in cities in Syria and Yemen. If you would like to help us bring powerful works by children caught up in war–and this whether you are a student and might have a teacher that would get involved, along with one of your classes, or an adult reader of Stone Soup–let me know your interest by responding to this newsletter. This week’s art, and experiencing war For many years the Children’s Art Foundation, publisher of Stone Soup, collected children’s art from around the world. We started the collecting in 1977. One of the first gifts we received were a set of linoleum prints from Greek Cypriot children who had been caught up in the 1984 war with Turkey. In June, 1991, I went to visit a friend in Maribor, Yugoslavia. I arrived at the border in a train from Paris. It was the day the war of independence between Slovenia and Yugoslavia began. I had come to see a friend to collect mushrooms. I had called my friend Anton from a phone booth in Paris to confirm my arrival the next day. He had said, “come!” But, when I actually showed up the next day, which turned out to be the second day of the war, he was amazed. It turned out that he had thought I was making a joke! When the first air raid siren went off and everyone in our apartment building went down to the basement to hide I experienced the feeling of helplessness that all civilians must feel in wars. It is the feeling of the girl in the print who is screaming as the bombs drop. What can you do? There is nothing to do but wait to see what is going to happen to you. It is the most horrible feeling. You can’t really hide. You can’t really run. If the bombs drop where you are, they will find you. The basement of our apartment was a half-basement. We were not even fully underground. There were windows high up. We sheltered in a storage room with the bikes and gardening tools. In the half-light of those small high windows, as the sirens wailed, we stood there together, silent, just waiting for the explosions. The apartment was a few blocks away from a big communications center that would be an obvious target in a war. I fully expected to die in that room. What ran through my head in a loop was this sentence: “How stupid to die in someone else’s war.” As it turned out, the Yugoslav air force didn’t bomb us. After only ten days, the Yugoslav government decided to retreat from Slovenia and it became an independent country. The war moved on to what had been other parts of Yugoslavia where it then raged for years. None of us are going to be able to end war. But I do think that if we can give voice to children who have survived wars, that might at least make people think a little longer before they send bombers to destroy our homes with us in them. My daughter is in sixth grade and at her school they practice drills for what to do if there is a shooter in the school. I am sure most of you have heard about the killings at a school in Florida last week. One of the more eloquent statements after the shooting by one of the high school students who survived was this question: “Why do we deserve this?” It is a haunting question. It is one that everyone in a war must have thought at one point or another. And we can ask that on behalf of the frightened girl in the linoleum print by Frosoula. Why did she deserve to be running from jet planes dropping bombs? Writing about injustice A few weeks ago my daughter read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I decided I’d read the book, too, as she had been so engrossed in it. Wow! Is it violent! It is a Young Adult novel so I know that many of you older Stone Soup readers have read it or are going to. I think one of the big themes of the book, perhaps even the theme, is that same question: “Why do I deserve this?” Or, in the case of the The Hunger Games: “I do not deserve this. We do not deserve this.” I don’t want you to write about a war you haven’t been in. But I would like you to try your hand at a story about injustice–a story that explores the feeling that you do not deserve what is happening to you. That feeling can lead to helplessness. It can also lead to action. It can even lead to an awakening that sets you free. I know that this is a hard one. But, if you are inspired and come up with something inspiring, please submit it to Stone Soup so Editor Emma can consider it for publication. Until next time,
Science Fiction Contest PDF
Have you heard that we’re having a Science Fiction story contest? If you’d like to know more details, please check out the guidelines on Submittable. We also have this great PDF poster that you can download, print out, and use to spread the word about this opportunity! Click on the link below: Science Fiction Contest Poster
