Adventure Twofer

I'm sure I've embraced several adventures over the last couple of months. And, when I have the time, I'll go back and post about some of them. In the meantime, I thought I'd just mention two adventures I managed to have on the same day, just this past Tuesday.

First, I gave a Courageous Woman presentation to a group of 4th-6th-graders through Girls Incorporated of the Island City in Alameda, an island in the San Francisco Bay just west of Oakland. This is the closest branch to me of the national Girls Inc. organization, whose mission is to inspire girls to be smart, strong, and bold—definitely a goal I support!

My talk was about being a writer and, as might be expected, some of the girls were bored, some were too shy to participate, and a few had their hands up for every question. I had previously posted a request to my Freelance Success writer friends for some fun writing activities for kids of this age, and I ended up using a couple of them. One was passing around a piece of paper that had a sentence on it. The first girl had to write a sentence that followed mine and then pass it to the next girl, after covering my sentence with another piece of paper. So each girl only saw only the last sentence of the story as she added her own. The final result was very imaginative and the girls seemed to get a kick out of it, since they asked their counselor if they could have copies of it.

Then I gave each girl a Post-It note with a characteristic written on it—for example, angry, impatient, sick, etc. Their task was to write a few sentences describing a fictional character with that trait, but without being allowed to actually use the word in the description. The purpose was for them to learn to “show, not tell” in their writing and I think it worked really well; even those girls who only wrote one sentence seemed to get the concept. (Of course, there was one girl who wrote an entire story, bringing back memories of having been a total keener myself in school...)

After they read their work, the other girls had to guess what the characteristic was, and in most cases they got it right away—although there were a couple of more challenging ones. For example, one girl, Jasmine, had written something like, “John and Bob hit Tom across the head with a board.” The girls shouted out “mad,” “mean,” and “cruel,” but Jasmine shook her head. Then another girl called out “rude,” and Jasmine nodded. I was a little taken aback but, on reflection, I would definitely have to agree that hitting somebody across the head with a board is pretty rude... :)

After the talk, I headed up to Berkeley, a little further north in the East Bay, and had dinner with a woman I had met in an online writing class two years ago and had been keeping in touch with via e-mail since then. She actually lives in Germany, but was visiting her sister in the States, and it just happened to work out great that she was close to the area where I was doing the talk anyway. We had a great meal at a Salvadoran restaurant and chatted about our various writing endeavors (and other stuff too!).

Yep, definitely a good day.