Magic Rocks and a Wrap Up

My last post was two weeks ago. Last time, I wrote that we were revamping the world of Harry Potter. Alas, that never came to pass. You see, the story cubes took off and the boys wanted to continue with it. So for the last classes for all the time slots, Rory and his story cubes ruled the day. I am finding that it's a great tool and must shout out to the mom who suggested it to me. Thank You, Elizabeth, for the recommendation. It's been a hit.   Last week, I used the cubes as a story telling tool, and I wrote down the kids', ideas and read them back. This week, we didn't write the stories, instead, we turned into story tellers. Last week, 27 kids collaborated and used the teacher as a ghostwriter. This week teacher and students told individual stories. That is, until the entrance of the little brother. Little brother entered the scene early on in the marathon class, earlier today. He was playing with some stones that he blithely informed us were magic rocks. 

Magic rocks, you say? Magic rocks. It's one of those ideas that, once taken hold, refuses to go away. We all decided to write a story about magic rocks. My students wrote complete stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I, however, had so many ideas I feel the beginning of a longer story. We will see what comes of that in the next few weeks.

And speaking of, Inkreadable Kids is taking a hiatus. There are no group classes for the next few weeks. Instead I am going to teach individual students that I promised to tutor once school ends. Then in the third week of June, Inkreadable Kids goes to summer camp. That's right following in the success of the camp day on May 2, we are going to teach the campers on a longer term basis. As I know more you will as well. That's all for this inkreadable installment. Stay tuned, as always, there's more to come.

Story Cubes Steal the Scene

This week at Inkreadable has been fairly quiet. Soccer season is in full swing at WIS and so two of my students have had to shuffle all of our schedules around. It wasn't just them, circumstances in my own life conspired to take away one Friday class, and a veritable comedy of techno errors conspired last Friday the 25th April, so that there was no class. In the first place, I could't receive email at the community center so I never received the emails from their mom asking if we were on. In the second place it poured cats and dogs and the boys didn't want to come out. I can't say that I blame them, It rained cats and dogs.

In the meantime, in Thursday Scene Stealers we finished up Cinderella's makeover and began reworking Harry Potter's world. Sorry, Ms. Rowling.  In our world, Harry and his aunt and uncle have a good relationship and his aunt is a witch herself. We will see how it develops next week.

Undisputedly, the best day at Inkreadable Kids, was  Friday afternoon. I had been talking to the facility manager at the community center about adding an Inkreadable session to their summer camp. I was asked to do a class as part of the camp day the center had on May 2. Accordingly, I ran to Child's Play, aka the best toy store in the world, and bought Rory's Story Cubes. The game has nine dice with a different picture one each face. You roll the dice and make up a story using the pictures that come up. I wanted to see if the game would work for children under seven years old whose reading skills have not yet developed. I walked into the community center early and found to my trepidation there were not fifteen kids to teach, the number was twenty seven. Turns out, there was nothing to worry about, the kids were fun and receptive. We did three stories in an hour. They are too random to recount, and also I can't really remember what the stories were.  I know that the kids and I had a blast and I might see some of them over the summer. The experiment was so successful, that I used it with my soccer laden WIS brothers today. No writing was done, but we became impromptu storytellers so that we could include the youngest child of the household. Here too, a fun time was had by all. Well, that's all for this installment of Inkreadable Kids. Stay tuned, as always, there is more to come.