Looking for Drama Instructors to Work with Children to Record Children’s Stories
When a new issue of Stone Soup is published, editor Gerry Mandel selects a story to feature on our website and asks the author to record a reading of the story. Over the years, we have built up a large archive of stories read by Stone Soup authors.
We are now thinking we would like to record stories we haven’t previously recorded. We are looking for drama teachers, or anyone with recording experience who works with children, to work with us to record children reading Stone Soup stories for posting on this website and on iTunes. We may even produce a CD. We have been publishing Stone Soup for thirty-seven years and have a wealth of material by children up to age thirteen to work with.
If you might be interested in this project, please write to me, william@williamrubel.com. I am thinking that making recordings of children might entail a collaboration between a classroom teacher, a drama teacher, and a radio presenter at a community college or university radio station who could do the actual recording, and possibly the editing as well.
I look forward to hearing from you.
William Rubel
Co-Editor of Stone Soup
Journal Times Article about Stone Soup Teen Author
The Racine, Wisconsin, Journal Times ran an article about Dylan Saunder’s story in the January/February issue of Stone Soup. Stone Soup is one of the few outlets for young teens to be published. The entire story from the Journal Times is reproduced, below:
First forum post
We have our first forum post. It is by a parent writing about her Tween daughter’s difficulty finishing stories. It is posted in the forum for questions to the Stone Soup editors. The forums still need help getting started. If you are a parent, teacher, or a kid and you have a question for us, please go to the forum and ask it. There are also forums for teachers and parents to share ideas about teaching creative writing — or to ask each other questions. We definitely need brave souls to start posting in these forums to get them off the ground. Thank you.
Stone Soup Archive
The Stone Soup archive has hundreds of stories, poems, and book reviews. The purpose of the online archive is to offer free resources for students, parents, and teachers who are interested in writing by kids. One feature that I would like to call your attention to is that the 322 stories published on the site can be sorted by subject. By selecting the subject you can create your own anthology so you can read stories that are on subjects that interest you.
The subject selection is also useful for teachers of creative writing. Creative writing assignments are often thematic. For every theme you will find that Stone Soup writers have taken very different approaches. This can help you develop projects for your own classroom. More simply, you can send your students to our web site for inspiration.
Help us get our forums going!
We have just put up three forums for teachers and parents. Getting forums started is the hard part. You can help us by visiting the forums and making those all important first posts. Thank you.
Stone Soup illustrator in the news
Getting published in Stone Soup can be a terrific motivational tool. Because of its reputation for quality, publication in Stone Soup is often newsworthy. Here is a recent article published in the Greater Media Newspapersof Middlesex, Mounmouth and Ocean Counties, New Jersey about the publication of Athena Gerasoulis’s artwork in the November/December 2009 issue of Stone Soup.
Our best December, ever!
All of us at Stone Soup would like to thank all of you for making this the best holiday season at Stone Soup, ever! The best in 37 years! Our ads in the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, Atlantic, Harpers, and the New York Review of Books are all doing better than ever before and it seems that you all like our redesigned website (launched mid-November). Last year’s sales had been poor and this year had been poor up to the holiday season. Then, suddenly, it was as if the sun came out from behind the clouds after a long winter storm. From sales being down compared with last year they are now up for the year! I can’t tell you how good that has been for our morale. The phones are ringing and the web orders are coming in as never before. Thank you!
If you are still thinking about a Christmas gift, it is never too late for Stone Soup. We are mailing gift announcements every day up until Christmas Eve. And if you are like me, and often wake up just about Christmas time to the awful realization that one has waited too long and there is no way to get a gift in time, just order a subscription and tell your young friend that you have done so. Stone Soup is the perfect gift for budding writers. It offers kids great pleasure throughout the year and is that rare gift that helps kids grow more expressive and creative.
Homeschooling Creative Writing Curriculum
Stone Soup is tailor made for parents who home school. One of the great benefits of homeschooling is individualized instruction. Rather than a one-size-fits-all creative writing curriculum, you can tailor lessons for your child. In this way, you build on your child’s strengths. But the disadvantage of working with one, or at most a few children at a time, is that instruction necessarily takes place isolated from other children. In the best classroom settings children working together on the same or similar projects inspire each other.
Publishing Links for Kids under 14
We’re proud of Stone Soup’s history and reputation as the leading print magazine publishing writing by kids. We encourage you to send us your work! However, we can’t begin to publish all the writing and art we receive, so we want you to know where else you can send your creative writing. Here are links to other magazines who publish young authors. If you’re over 13, be sure to scroll down to the teen magazines.
The Perfect Gift for a Creative Child
I have come late to being a parent. The idea for Stone Soup came to me in 1972 when I was a college student teaching writing and art to community children in a University sponsored Saturday morning art program. My colleague, Gerry Mandel, and I have been working on
