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| Created by a Dream Keeper writer and artist |
We experience a unique magic at the Dream Keepers table. For just a few moments, the appeal of phones and computers and the pressures of school drop away. Students create stories and poems and tiny books from their own imagination. They fold and cut paper. They sketch and draw and color. They jot down ideas--thinking about the story they're telling more than the mechanics of writing it down.
Some days it feels like a great feat--it's tough to shut off the noise of the world. Children are not used to working with their hands, and it can be hard and awkward to fold paper into snowflakes or tiny books. Parents and other grown ups want the writing to follow the rules.
But the effort matters. I can tell that it's worth it every time a student gets that look in their eyes--they have an idea! I can tell it matters every time students read their stories aloud and beam with the pride of telling their story with their own words. I can see that its worth it when the students take home extra blank books so that they can write more stories.
Here are some of the amazing projects we worked on this year.
The Best Part of Me
We started out the year writing about our favorite parts of ourselves, inside and out! This young writer loves her nose!
Scary Stories
The students love to write stories that scare me. Boo! Frightening illustrations are a bonus.
Snowflake Poems
We had a lot of snow this year--so everyone wanted to capture the feeling of snow and the experience of skating and sledding. To make it even more fun, we wrote our poems on snowflakes that we cut out ourselves. It took us awhile to get the hang of it. But a few of the writers had lots of practice cutting out snowflakes and could teach the rest of us!
Tiny Books
We made many tiny books this year, both at our regular Dream Keepers meetings as well as at special events like the Martin Luther King Day Celebration at King Library and Browser's Book Bash. As you can see below, crafting tiny books gives students the opportunity to play with both words and illustrations. Notice that some of our writers wrote books in Spanish!
Urban Wildlife: Poetry in Your Backyard
A good part of my year was spent working with instructors from the Milwaukee Public Museum and teaching about the wildlife we see in our own backyard. The students wrote the most brilliant poems about the nature they saw on their way to school, at the park, and even in their own yards. This young student wrote about his experience with a goose.
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