A note from William Rubel We did it! Or, to be more accurate, Jane Levi, our rock of competence, has shepherded this project to completion. The Stone Soup 2017 annual is being published in response to so many of you saying how much you miss print and how important having Stone Soup in print form is to you. The Stone Soup Annual is 350 pages. It is a magnificent book. Full colour, every issue for the year, plus bonus material from the website. We selected a high quality paper in keeping with Stone Soup’s long-standing production values. The book weighs over one pound! What you will get are the print issues from the first half of the year and the digital issues from the second half of the year all bound together in one volume: eight issues covering January to December 2017. Also in the volume you will find work by winners of our contests, selected posts from our young bloggers, and music written by our Stone Soup composers. The issues inside the volume are formatted exactly as the Stone Soup print issues have been for years. The cover and new material are designed by one of London’s most sought after designers of art museum catalogues. We will also be using a new design from Joe Ewart for our monthly issues starting in January 2018. Joe brings a freshness and energy to his design that I know you will all appreciate, and which I think you will agree lives up to the quality of our contributors’ work. This is a book that is a pleasure to hold and to look at as well as to read. The Stone Soup Annual is finalised and at the printer. In publishing terms, it is “forthcoming”. We are expecting delivery of our piles of books in early December, ready to ship out. Later in the year we will have a new subscription system in place so you will be able to order a digital subscription plus the print Annual as a bundle for next year. In the meantime, you need to order the print Annual 2017 separately. Please go to our online store, Stonesoupstore.com, and order your copies. I’d like to close by encouraging you to listen to “Let This be the World”, a lovely song without words sung by Kathleen Werth, also the artist responsible for the magnificent cover of our first Stone Soup Annual, 2017. Until next week, William Bloggers There are several new blog posts up from our new young bloggers, so do please visit our website to read them and comment. We’ve been delighted by the response they’ve had so far. If you are a young writer and have something you want to say on our blog, let me know. The November Issue is online now – don’t miss it! We wrote to everyone on Wednesday announcing the November issue of Stone Soup. If you haven’t had a chance yet to read it, do make some time to go to our website this weekend and enjoy the fantastic selection of stories, poems and artworks we’ve chosen for you this month. Congratulations to all our talented contributors! Also, if you didn’t get our email about the new issue, please check your spam folder and make sure you have told your system you want to receive email from us (assuming you do!). We won’t ever bother you with email you don’t want (you can unsubscribe any time at the bottom of our emails), but we certainly don’t want you to miss out on any new material, especially when it’s the current issue off your magazine. From Stone Soup May/June 2004 The Lone Wolf By Preston Craig, 10 Illustrated by J. Palmer, 13 Alexis Jamison looked thoughtfully at the young gray wolf anxiously pacing the enclosure. “You’ve got green eyes. That’s odd. Did you know that most gray wolves have gold eyes, or yellow even?” Alexis Jamison looked thoughtfully at the young gray wolf anxiously pacing the enclosure. “You’ve got green eyes. That’s odd. Did you know that most gray wolves have gold eyes, or yellow even?” The wolf whined fearfully, a pup’s apprehensive sound, and Alex looked helplessly at it. “I can’t do anything yet,” she continued bitterly. “You’re going to be released, don’t you know that? What’s your name, anyway?” She looked at the piece of paper tacked lopsidedly to the fence, her father’s practically illegible handwriting spelling out the words: Lupus. Gray wolf. Approximately two years old. “Lupus, is that your name then?” Alex said interestedly. “Good name for a gray wolf.” Lupus whined again. “Oh, Lupus,” she murmured, her voice breaking. She jumped to her feet, put a hand against the fence briefly, then tore herself away and strode toward her house, trying hard to keep from turning back to Lupus. The cool Alaskan air bit at Alex as she walked across the field of dying grass. She was used to wolves; there were plenty here at the gray wolf release center her father had begun four years ago. She had come here every summer since her parents split up when she was six. Alex had learned everything there was to know about endangered gray wolves from her father, and was already able to help him with his work. She didn’t usually let herself get attached to any of the wolves, knowing they were eventually going to be released and she’d never see them again, but she was curiously interested in Lupus… /more
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Writing Process: Sounding the Key Word Outline
Years ago, when I was doing contract negotiations for a small advertising agency, the CFO gave me some good advice at the start. Always know what you’re talking about, she said. If you do, you’ll do fine. I’d never negotiated contracts before but nevertheless, was placed to work for their biggest client, JCPenney. I renewed our client’s media contracts with small circulars, monthly or weekly newspapers all over the U.S. I had to do a lot of talking. I had to know what I was talking about.Now, I teach my son to read and understand what he’s reading. It is a skill, to comprehend what is unfamiliar. More still, it takes a good grasp of this unfamiliar material to be able to speak about it with others, to share it with confidence. My son, like me, is starting to hone that instruction I was given on the job. Sounds like tired advice, but really, it is something we tend to overlook. In my previous post, I wrote about how young writers can use the reconstruction method into their writing process repertoire. I mentioned how in the homeschool, I give my son source material to create a keyword outline. This outline is what he uses to orally introduce his subject. He reads from the outline, summoning familiar information and details cued up from the outline. It is a rudimentary exercise, for my fifth grader, since he will produce a written work only after he can listen to himself present it in public speaking. When we write, we cannot hear the words, until they are vocalized. And this is when we are able to catch nuance, extraneous information that may not fit our written purpose. It develops over time, to know the material well enough to the point where an outline is only a guide, and not a script. He is getting closer and closer to learning this well. Aren’t we told as writers of the long form to read aloud our work anyway? The principle is the same and reveals much of may be left out or vice versa. One way to train the young writer to exercise confidence in their writing with the outline as a guide to speaking the material is to have your writer observe public speaking. My husband teaches Bible study at our church and my son will observe similarities between his father and his own practice at home. We are happy that the language arts curriculum my son uses has encouraged him to bolster his outlining performance, and I throw in the public speaking factor for good measure! After he’s confident about how the acquired knowledge of the material he’s learned sounds (whether he is writing about Peyton Manning, or writing a story based off three pictures in a series), then he can proceed to draft it, and dress it up with because and who/which clauses, adverbial clauses, strong verbs, quality adjectives, prepositions, and all other manner of mechanics, devoid of banned words. The benefits of sounding the key word outline as a precursor to writing a draft go transcend to other skills that will eventually grow writing, public speaking and reading comprehension.
The Life of Mahatma Gandhi and the Act of Going Deeper in Learning
Eleven seventh graders and one teacher are clustered around three white tables in the middle of a small room, the walls adorned with maps, a white board, and a picture of Gandhi at a spinning wheel. We are discussing Gandhi’s religion and how it influenced him in his philosophy and life. Ideas bounce around the table, but I have run out of things to say. Our limited information comes from a few days of teacher presentations, class discussions, and short articles that our teacher handed out it class. All of the information is very school-like, interesting, but minimal because of the time limitations. After a few more ideas fly by, my mind drifts to my Gandhi book that I had picked off the shelf yesterday. It was The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, by Louis Fischer. I had gobbled the first few chapters up, taking in all the information I could about his death, the Hindu religion, and nonviolence. That information comes back to me and my hand shoots up. His relationship with his very religious mother led him to read the Gita and other religious texts when he was in law school. The Gita taught him to not feel temptation, which contributed to him being able to stay non-violent and peaceful. Then class is over, and instead of the learning about Gandhi being over too, I have the Gandhi book in my hand, ready to be read. I was more confident in class because I went deeper in this subject, but more importantly, I learned that I can go deeper in my learning. I may not ever need to know about Gandhi’s relationship with his mother, but learning to love and to go deeper with a subject is a skill that I will want in my life. I homeschooled until 6th grade, and I was taught at an early age that learning has no beginning or end, that you are constantly learning. We went regularly to the library and explored the Library of Congress, Folger Shakespeare Library, National Gallery, and all of the museums on the DC mall. When I homeschooled, learning was an all day experience. It was not confined to a small classroom, but opened up to the whole world. I learned when I was homeschooling that the world of learning is a mansion. The teacher’s job is to hand you the key and bring you to the entryway. However, there are so many more rooms to go through. They may not be neat and tidy like the information that your teacher presents you, but there are endless closets, drawers, and nooks and crannies to explore.. So, I challenge you, don’t let the mindset of having school work be the only way you learn take over. This week, month, or even semester, take something that you are learning about in school, or are super interested in, and find a book about it at the library, or read an article, or talk to an adult (other than your teacher) who knows about it. Dig into the subject even deeper–be an explorer, a researcher, an adventurer, a learner–and see what you find. Good luck!
