Introduction to this Stone Soup Writing Activity This excellent story gets to the heart of why lying is wrong. Lying destroys trust between people. And when people don’t trust each other, they can never be really close—not even if they are family members. When we read (or hear) a little lecture on the evils of lying (or the evils of almost anything), we have a tendency to “tune out” the information. That is why, since the first stories were told, storytellers have been inventing characters and plots and scenery and dialogues to help those of us who are perhaps not as imaginative as other people to understand the many ways that breaking a moral code can cause harm. Unfortunately, many moral tales are boring. And this is all the more reason to recognize how very successful Meredith’s story is. She doesn’t preach and lecture. Instead, she tells us a story—a believable story with believable characters who talk and act realistically. No part of her story seems forced or fake. And that is how she makes us understand how even a relatively small lie is a big thing, and a bad thing. Project: Writing a Good Moral Tale Discuss with your teacher or parents or friends various moral rules—like it is wrong to lie, steal, cheat, or to maliciously tease someone. Now, using your imagination, invent a character or characters with unique personalities. Use these characters to create a story, like Meredith did, that will make people understand what wrong was done, why it was wrong, what impact the wrong thing had. Try to think of as many angles to the problem you choose to write about as possible. For instance, we say it is bad to maliciously tease someone. You will find it fairly easy to create a story that shows how teasing can hurt the person who is teased. You can also use your story to tackle more difficult problems—like creating a story that also shows how teasing hurts the person who does the teasing. Think of as many ways as you can to show us the effects of your chosen problem. Little Lies By Meredith Proost, 12, Aloha, Oregon Illustrated by Lucy Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, Portland, Oregon Reprinted with permission from Treasures, © 1985 From the September/October 1985 issue of Stone Soup It all began one Tuesday when Melinda and I lost all track of time and found we couldn’t possibly finish our practicing before our mom came home from grocery shopping. Before she left, we had agreed to do all our chores and practice piano. “Yes,” we said together when Mom asked if we had finished our practicing. But when she walked into the living room, there was the piano music, stacked just as she had stacked it that morning. And the lesson book was on the table where we had left it after our piano lesson the day before. Mom knew we were lying. She had a sad look on her face. Before Melinda or I could make up an excuse, Mom told us that she was going to tell us a lie some time during the next few days. We wouldn’t know when she was lying, and the lie would be something very important to both of us. That night Mom told us that the next morning when we woke up, breakfast would be waiting: hot cereal with lots of cream and even more brown sugar, just the way we like it. Melinda and I looked at each other knowingly. That must be the lie. But the next morning when we woke up, in the kitchen we found our bowls of hot cereal with lots of cream and even more brown sugar, just the way we like it. On Wednesday, Mom told us that she would pick us up right after school so that we could go shopping for spring clothes. Melinda and I looked at each other knowingly and said to ourselves that had to be the lie. We decided we would be going home on the bus as usual. But after school, there sat Mom in the parking lot ready to take us shopping. The following day our dad was on a business trip. Mom told us to pick a restaurant, Italian or Chinese, and the three of us would go out for dinner that night. Melinda and I looked at each other knowingly. That must be the lie. If we said Chinese, Mom would take us out for pizza. If we said Italian, we knew we’d be having chow mein for dinner. We said, “Chinese,” and that night we had won ton soup, chow mein, fortune cookies and tea. When we arrived home from school Friday, Mom greeted us with, “Guess what! I just reserved two airplane tickets. You two get to fly—all by yourselves—to visit your grandma over spring vacation.” Now that is something we had always wanted to do. We had dreamed about traveling alone and talked about it for years. Ordinarily we would have run to our rooms to start packing, even though spring vacation was three weeks away. But we looked at each other knowingly. That had to be the lie. Mom may have been surprised at our lack of excitement, but she didn’t say a word. She waited until the following day to ask us if we had discovered her lie. Melinda said, “Yes, we know. We won’t be flying to Grandma’s for spring vacation. Everything else you have said has been true, so the airplane trip must be the lie.” “I’m glad it’s finally over,” I said. Melinda said, “Yes. It has been awful for days thinking we couldn’t trust you. I guess we deserved that little lie about flying to Grandma’s.” Mom smiled. “The lie was that I would tell you a lie,” she said softly. “I haven’t told you any lies. The tickets to Grandma’s are under your pillow. Sweet dreams.” Happy ending.
writing activity
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.
Writing Activity: adopting a style through unusual language, with “Once Upon a Time” by Robin Eldred, 6
Introduction to This Stone Soup Writing Activity “Once Upon a Time” is an example of a story written in unusual English. This work is by a six-year-old and is a good example of how young children express themselves differently from older children and adults. You will find lots of run-on sentences and dreamlike images flowing one into another. You will also see a lot of very short sentences, that are partly a sign that the author is very young, and partly a very effective method of story telling. You will see these techniques used by famous adult authors, as well as by some of the younger authors published in Stone Soup. It is also a useful practice for people working on poetry. Project: Adopting a Style For this project, create a narrator (the person who tells the story) who thinks in and speaks in an unusual English, in an unusual style. Think of a character—a infant, an older person, a visitor to your country whose first language is different, a person who is dreaming or confused for some reason, or someone living in an imaginary world of imaginary people and imaginary language. The fun of this project, and the challenge, is to find, invent and adopt the language of your character, use it to create your world and tell your story, and to make it understandable to your readers. So, imagine you aren’t you, whether you are a different age, or from a different time or place or planet, and that you think and speak an English different from your own in structure and wording. Who and what do you see? How do you describe it? And what is the story you have to tell? If it helps you to tell the story, illustrate it too. Once Upon a Time By Robin Elder, 6, Hopewell, New Jersey Illustrated by the author From the March/April 1986 issue of Stone Soup Once upon a time there was a little girl and a little boy. The little girl’s name was Judy. The little boy’s name was Michael. They lived in a old house. They played in the backyard. Their seesaw was made out of wood, their swingset was made out of wood, and their slide was made out of wood. They had a garden. The little boy went out to play and when he swung on the swings he saw a rainbow. It was just after a rainstorm when he went out to play. He went to his sister and his sister went outside. They both looked up at the sky. They saw the rainbow. They got their mother and father and then they were all standing outside looking at the rainbow. Then they heard a big boom. Their mother went into the kitchen, their father went into the bedroom, the little girl stayed outside, and the little boy went into the front yard. The mother found a broken window, the father found the faucet turned on, the little girl found the fence broken, and the little boy found an old man. The little boy went into the house and called the police. He said, “Somebody robbed our house.” And the police came and said, “Did you rob their house?” The old man said, “No, I am the plumber. I came to fix the sink. The fence got broken by the rain. The window got broken by the lightning. And they couldn’t turn off the sink, so I came just to fix the sink.” So the policeman said, “Where’s the rain and where’s the lightning? I need to arrest them.” But then the rain came and the lightning and everyone was safe and sound in the house but the policeman. He stayed outside and tried to catch the rain and lightning. When the rain and lightning stopped, there were two pretty rainbows and then it happened over and over. And then the little boy said, “Look at the rainbows.” Everybody looked. Everybody saw one rainbow for each of them. They all climbed their rainbows and slid down and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around until somebody stopped and then somebody else and somebody else and else and else and else and else. And there was a rainbow monster and a rainbow dragon and a rainbow bunny and a rainbow deer.
