Carey Jane Clark

Inspiration for Young Writers

February 2, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

I personally do not believe in writer’s block. If I hit a snag when writing, I know it’s usually my fear of messing something up. So to burst through the issue, I open a new document in my word processor.

The new blank page is my place to play, to mess up, if need be, and to “talk things out” with myself. I just begin to write. Often, before I hit the half-page mark, I’ve solved my issue and can move on. My favorite new tool for mucking about on a blank page? 750words.com (For more insight on how to break through writer’s block, check out Cec Murphey’s series of posts on the subject.)

But faced with a blank page, kids, sometimes need a nudge in the right direction. Here’s a collection of some great sources for writing prompts:

The Story Kitchen – Kids pick a hero, a place and a villain. They have a chance to think about how they’d put all that together before the story kitchen cooks up an opening. They have to finish the story.
The Story Starter, Jr. – Generates a random beginning. It can get pretty preposterous. Here’s the beginning I was given to work with: The detective was writing a poem in the park. This is the “junior” version. The version for adults gave me this as a starter: The amazed hiker dialed the cell phone in the gas station for the mystery writer. Hmmm….
Scholastic Story Starter – Just plain fun.
Thirty writing prompts for elementary students at SuperTeacherWorksheets.com
CanTeach has an abundant source of writing prompts at their site as well. Hats off to this great Canadian site. (What can I say?)
Not enough? How about a writing prompt for every day of the year.

And just so the kids don’t get to have all the fun, here’s a couple of sites with great writing prompts for adults:

Creative Writing Prompts
Bonnie Neubauer’s Story Spinner – Generates a setting, a starting phrase and four words that must be incorporated in the story. The challenge is to finish in 10 minutes.

http://www.brucevanpatter.com/storykitchen.html

- Carey Clark

Another Writing tool for Kids

January 31, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

Last week I shared about our family’s experiences using Junior Writer. Another fun tool for writing practice that gives kids a sense of achievement and parents or grandparents something to treasure is Tikatok.

With Tikatok, children can create and publish their own stories. Children can work in one of two ways. On the Tikatok app, they can create the story and pictures entirely electronically, with “stickers” and/or their own drawings made in the app.

Or they can write the story on Tikatok and draw pictures the old fashioned way and scan the pictures to add them as illustrations.

Kids have three different choices about the types of books they’ll make:

Personalized stories, suitable for any age of child.
Stories made with a story starter.
Stories that are entirely their own creations.

Here are some of the story starters kids can use to spark their imaginations:

Once a StorySpark™ is chosen, Tikatok generates certain story elements for the child, and others must be filled in. We’ll choose one as an example. Let’s choose Animals and Bugs. Tikatok gives us the following story options:

An Animal Holiday – Animals love to go on vacation, too. Write about what your favorite animal does while on holiday.

My Favorite Animal – A book to learn all about my favorite animal.

A Safari Photo Adventure – Get your cameras ready for an African safari where you’ll see many rare and wondrous species!

A Penguin Adventure – A penguin takes a wrong turn and ends up far from home. Help the poor penguin get back!

Fish Finds a Sunken Ship – A fish that lives deep in the ocean explores a sunken ship!

City Dogs in the Wild – What happens when a couple of city dogs go to the woods and meet their wild brothers and sisters?

Let’s choose A Penguin Adventure. After we choose a name for our Penguin and whether the character is male or female, our story is generated, and we can start illustrating it, using sticker illustrations or from a child’s own drawings.

Some story sparks require children to enter more information, some less. Or there is the option of creating an original story entirely from the child’s own imagination.

In the end, children can publish their stories in ebook or print book format, making a keepsake book for their families.

And for Wednesday only, Tikatok is offering free digital publishing!

- Carey Clark

On the Mend

January 30, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

This week brought more blessings. On Tuesday, I visited the nutritionist I began to see when I gave up on traditional medicine to help me after my third miscarriage. My doctor had already told me I was anemic. Her prescription: more iron. When that didn’t do the trick, her best advice was even more iron. But despite my best efforts, I couldn’t seem to get enough iron, and there seemed to be more wrong than just that. There were more questions being raised than answers found.

The miscarriages were devastating. I was basically told to give up. But I knew something was systemically wrong with me.

Since seeing the nutritionist, I knew things had improved. I could tell by the appearance of my skin and hair and the improvement in my energy level, among other things. Because of the way this nutritionist does her testing, I can actually see with scientific proof how I’m improving. It’s so wonderful to have it confirmed: I am on the mend. So the first thing I am thankful for this week is:

40. I am finally on the mend.
41. I received much-needed encouragement this week, and heard from readers of After the Snow Falls with their accounts of how the book has touched them. So wonderful!
42. Despite significant financial challenges over the past year and a half, we have never gone hungry. We have never really wanted.
43. Our kids all passed their swimming levels this week! This was a big hurdle, and something they had begun to be discouraged about it. I’m so thrilled for them.
44. We’ve made friends at swimming lessons we plan to stay in touch with as we leave. Our kids are friends with their kids, and we hit it off with mom and dad. I love it when that happens.
45. We are on the home stretch. Though packing is never my favorite thing, the end is in sight.
46. It looks like some of our challenges with figuring out the visas we need for our trip are being sorted out and we may actually book tickets by the end of this week!
47. I was able to interview one of my favorite authors for my Friday Fiction Fix last week.
48. I am very energized, working on my next writing project.
49. I’ve been excited about developing a freewriting habit at 750words.com
50. We had a chance to reunite with some wonderful friends this week for a bit of a sending-off.
51. Despite the pain of having to decide what toys stay, get given away or get packed, my kids are doing better than I am about it. I am blessed with three wonderful children.
52. I have been following along with 31 Days to Build a Better Spouse, and have been blessed every day to realize what a great husband JavaMan is.
53. We had some car trouble this week, but some great neighbors and a wonderful mechanic stepped in to help.
54. I have wonderful parents, who pitched in to help on the weekend when we packed. Without them and JavaMan, I couldn’t have gotten through the day.
55. We had a bit of a financial breakthrough this week–something we’ve been waiting for for quite a while.
56. I have arranged for a number of reviews for After the Snow Falls with bloggers, but once they have it, I simply have to wait until their finished reading and the reviews come out, but three reviews in a row came out last week. That was a nice surprise, and they were all five-star reviews. That was an even nicer surprise!
57. I found a great substitute for the big heavy timeline book we were going to have to drag to China with us. I’m going to blog about it sometime soon, it’s so wonderful.
58. My recent review of Junior Writer has become very popular, and has found the attention of the children’s book publisher who brought it to the web. That was nice.
59. Today, my parents helped my kids with homeschool while JavaMan and tied up loose ends at the house where we’ve been living. The house was so quiet. I realized what a blessing the laughter of children–and even a little chaos–is in the house.

How about you? Have you counted your blessings this week? I’m counting to a thousand with Multitudes on Mondays and Ann Voskamp’s lovely blog:

- Carey Clark

January 3 in 30 Wrap-Up

January 29, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

Not that I’m complaining–I’ve needed every minute of it–but has January seemed like a long month to you? I’m glad it’s just about over. I had a rough weekend. The aforementioned boxes from yesterday’s post are now mostly full, and I have yet to find space for my clothing or about 75 pounds of homeschool materials. At one point on Saturday, I walked into my room, closed the door and just sat on the bed and stared out the window. JavaMan was a little concerned about my state at that point, I think. He has promised to work his packing magic on some of the already-packed content in the hope we can still fit more in. Weight-wise we’re fine, but volume is a problem–not helped by the fact that the bins we usually buy for packing have been downsized by a number of inches.

I did eventually emerge from the room, but at that point, I just grabbed the nearest bin and began to shove everything in in an effort to make the move happen and postpone the puzzling over how to make it all fit.

Discouraged and exhausted at the end of the day, I didn`t want to write about goals. So I put it off to the very end of the day.

All in all, at the end of the day, I didn`t do too badly on reaching my goals, however:

Go to bed at 10:00 p.m. Okay so the last week, not so much, but I have been much more disciplined about this, and forming much better habits. I`ve conscripted JavaMan to help me with this one, and I`ve turned down opportunities to stay up just that little bit later and do one thing more in favor of being in bed reading at 9:30 or even earlier much more often than my normal modus operandi.
Spend at least one hour a day purging and sorting. Capacity problems aside, I think I handled this move much better than the previous ones, and allotted enough work to the days leading up to the move to make things more or less sane. I could have done with a few more child-free moments in the month, but I homeschool. Whaddaya gonna do?
Keep homeschool time sacred. Again, I think I did a pretty good job keeping things sane and reasonable for myself and the kids. Again, this week, as the move loomed closer, I did sacrifice homeschool a couple of days, but let`s face it, there was a LOT to do, and two days seems pretty reasonable in the grand scheme of things.

What will be a great relief is that by the time JavaMan and I rework the packaging issues and find ourselves places for those homeschool things and my clothes (details!), we`ll be better prepared for this move than any other, and there won`t be any last-minute scale juggling, staying up the night before a flight trying to cram in one last thing. THAT will be something to be grateful for. And the dark hours of January 28 will seem a distant memory. Right? Tell me I`m right.

- Carey Clark

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