Classroom Creativity Activities

As a writer of books for children, I try to find ways to bring out their creativity. When I do school readings, I use word-play games to help stimulate the kids’ imagination. For example, my book If You Swallow that Seed (see all my books at http://www.4rvpublishingcatalog.com/wayne-harris-wyrick.php) is about a child whose mother says all those “momisms” we’ve all heard (and perhaps said to our kids) like “If you swallow that seed, a watermelon will grow out of your ear” or “ It’s as easy as falling off of a cliff.” In my book, all of those mom sayings come true, and the child needs to figure out how to break the spells.

After I read the book and as the students and I are discussing it, I ask them what is the oddest thing a parent ever said to them. I also ask what is something odd a parent might say to their child and under what circumstances the parent might say it. That also touches on the Language Arts aspect that teachers in those grade levels are always looking for.

Another creativity spark I use with my own children but have not yet fully refined it for a classroom setting is Create-a-Story. I first thought of this while driving in the car with my bored son Ethan. He knew I wrote children's books; one is even dedicated to him. This is how the activity works. One of us starts telling a story. We have no restrictions on the plot. After the first person makes up what is essentially a few paragraphs, he/she passes the narrative on to the other storyteller. That person must continue the story without contradicting anything that has happened in the story up to that point. This continues back and forth until the story reaches a conclusion, or we arrive at our destination. Because each storyteller can add only so much but wants to impact the story, the action tends to occur at a fast and furious pace.

We have come up with some quite interesting stories. Ethan, now a young adult, often centered his stories around racing cars, a favorite theme of his then and a favorite pastime of his now. My daughter Azuranna, now 12, usually centers hers around fairies and nature nymphs, and, typically, they end up with us (the stories always include one or both of us, or her and her best friend at the time, and often our dog Buki, as characters) falling into a secret hole in the earth or passing through some kind of dimensional portal in a tree or some such enchanted opening, only to end up in the magical fairy universe.

The stories my children and I create never contain raw violence or gore. I didn’t have to make that rule; my kids simply were not raised with such themes being something to glorify. Anytime I see the story going in a direction I think is inappropriate, I use my turn to steer it differently.

But the stories do become somewhat repetitive. A few days ago, Azuranna and I were telling a story and I specifically wanted her to have to create a different narrative. When she set it up for us to interact with fairies, I flipped it around to aliens coming to Earth, taking us into their space ship, different but not so different to make her lose interest. She admitted to being surprised as soon as I constructed that scenario but was thoroughly intrigued to see where this new idea would take us. In fact, we never got to the end of that story, and for the next several days, she beseeched me to finish the story.

While a child may always aim for a familiar plot, the creativity is sparked when the story takes a twist, just as in real story writing. Even when we are in her familiar, comfortable fairy world, I constantly throw in twists she did not anticipate. That keeps the entire story-creation enterprise fresh so that she always loves doing it.

This is how I plan to adapt this to a classroom setting. First, as I describe the activity to the kids, I will explicitly state that certain topics (violence, crime, gore, etc) are off limits. Not that kids stories can’t include any of that; the Goosebumps series comes to mind. But, not all kids are comfortable with such topics. Second, I will set a specified creation time for each child, probably some number of sentences. I am loathed to set a time limit, like 2 minutes per child, as I want to be able to encourage the reluctant kids who might otherwise sit and think through a time allotment without saying anything. With a sentence allotment, I can encourage that child without a ticking clock.

I plan on asking the teacher in advance which kids are outgoing and eager to talk and which are shy and rarely speak. Those shy students are the ones I most want to reach but must tread more carefully with. I would start by calling on a few of the talkative kids to get the ball rolling then sprinkle in the shier students. By planning the time carefully, I would attempt to get every child involved, although I recognize that some children are just so shy, they may never be willing to participate.

If the teacher has a large dry-erase board or large writing pad, I may have kids come up and write a few sentences. Some kids who may not be willing to speak might be willing to write a few sentences. And if the teacher agrees, before I leave I would write a few sentences on the board/pad to start a new story and let the kids work on the story as classroom time permits. Many teachers today have electronic write-on, or smart, boards that can capture whatever is written on them to a computer, so each kid could get a copy of their combined story.

Another rule of this activity is that I or the teacher can jump in at any time to add something to the story. This allows me to steer it away from repetition or a known popular kid’s story (Azuranna did that in the beginning before I explained that we wanted to create an original story). It also allows us to keep the story from going to topics that might be inappropriate in that classroom setting.

This is one of several ideas I am working on to interact with school kids using education standards of language arts. Others may become topics of future blogs.

I would love to hear your ideas on the subject. Please leave comments below or email me at wyrickwrites@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Kristin Perkins and Jay Thomas, elementary teacher friends of mine, for invaluable comments on this piece.

Killer Asteroid? Not This Time.

Sixty-six million years ago, a 6-mile-wide asteroid smashed into what is now the Gulf of Mexico. Red-hot debris blasted into the atmosphere and fell back to Earth, causing planet-wide fires. After that, dust and soot filled the air for years, blocking most of the sunlight from the surface of the planet. The net result is that some 75% of life on Earth, including all dinosaurs, went extinct.

On September 9^th this year, asteroid 2006 QV89 will come calling. While its size, a mere 130 feet across, makes it far less dangerous than the dinosaur killer, if it hit a major city, it would certainly destroy most or all of it and kill perhaps millions of people. But you probably don’t need to worry too much. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) estimates there is only a 1 in 7,299 chance it will strike Earth. Their best estimate is that it will miss Earth by more than 4 million miles. That’s more than 16 times the Moon’s distance from us.

Artist rendering. Credit NASA

ESA keeps a tally of known asteroids that pose a collision risk with Earth. You can find it at http://neo.ssa.esa.int/risk-page. While this 1 in 7,300 risk isn’t very high, an asteroid designated 2010 RF12 poses a 1 in 16 chance of collision with Earth on September 5^th,, 2095. While that asteroid is less than 35 feet across, it will create a spectacular sight if it does enter our atmosphere, and can still cause considerable damage.

No other known asteroid poses a significant risk in the near future, so this upcoming near-miss will be our closest dance with asteroid destruction for a while.

Until the next asteroid with a high collision risk is discovered.

On or about the first Tuesday of each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. On the following day, I post that same column to my blog page. This is reprinted by permission from the Oklahoman and www.newsok.com.