Dream Keepers Blog

--> Collect Words by Rochelle Melander My 9th grade English teacher loved the word garage. I didn't get it. For me, the word garage conjured up images of oil spots and old tools. She kept saying, "Listen to the sound, to how the word rolls off your tongue: garage." This morning as I walked the dog, her words came back to me. I muttered to myself, "Garage, garage, garage." More "g" words came to me: Garage. Gasoline. Gawk. Gorgeous. Gorgonzola. I said them aloud to the dog. He sniffed at the ground, ignoring me. But I kept going—I was finally appreciating the sound of the words, noticing how they felt as they rolled off my tongue. In Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge 's book Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life WithWords , she dedicated a whole chapter to "collecting words and creating a wordpool." She says, "Words are lightweight, unbreakable, portable, and they're everywhere. You can even make them up. ... A w...

Choose an old object from your home. If you don’t have any, find a picture of an antique online. Imagine that when you touch the object, you are transported to its original time and place. *Where are you? *What happens? *How do you interact with the object? Write about it!

Dream Keepers Successes  by Rochelle Melander 2017-2018 Highlights We've had a great year at Dream Keepers.  We've brought the program to two libraries, Capitol Drive Library and the brand new Historic Mitchell Street Library . We once again brought Bing! Bang! Boom!, our program on noisy poetry, to the Dr. Seuss Day Celebration at Central Library . We led a workshop on reading and writing poetry for the members of the Milwaukee Public Library Teen Advisory Board. Bing! Bang! Boing! I love teaching noisy poetry...and the students love writing it. Here are some of my favorite examples from this year's Dr. Seuss Day celebration! Summer Writing Join me this summer, right here at the blog, for Wednesday writing prompts. We'll try to make them fun...just for you.

Dear Super Writers, Dream Keepers   Writing Circle got off to an excellent start last night! For those of you who didn't make it, let me share with you a bit of the fun we had. A student wanted to make paper airplanes, so we planned and folded.  Then we wrote poems on the airplanes. One poem contained a challenge: The student also wrote a how-to guide—for anyone who didn't know how to fold an airplane.  I should have read it before I accepted the challenge to race my paper-airplane. I lost. He won.  My plane took a deep nose dive and crashed at my feet. His flew over the check out counter and sailed toward the window. Perhaps my plane was weighed down by words?  Join us next time at Capitol Drive Library. We'll be unleashing our wild imaginations and creating stories of magic and wonder!  Take a look at the dates below and join us!  --Ms. Rochelle The Dream Keeper's Writi...