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.
We are looking for bloggers
We are looking for teachers of creative writing to maintain a blog at the Stone Soup website. You will have your own separate blog, but located at our site. The web address will be yourname.stonesoup.com. We are aiming to get the first blogs up around the first of the year. We’d like you to write about what you do when you teach creative writing. We at Stone Soup believe in the usefulness of using writing by children in at least some part of the creative writing program, we are looking for teachers who share this philosophy.
Stone Soup and Creative Writing
Creative writing, as a term, was invented in the 19th century to express the idea that there was writing, and then there was creative writing. With use, the expression has lost meaning and now creative writing is synonymous with writing fiction or poetry, as opposed to writing nonfiction. But at Stone Soup we think that it is is important to stick with first principles. Since our founding in 1973, our goal has always been to publish writing by children that is creative in the primary sense of the word — writing that is inventive.
Submitting Creative Writing for Publication
Stone Soup provides the opportunity for students to learn about the publication process. Our contributors’ guidelines include information about format, response time, and payment. It’s nice when submissions are accompanied by a cover letter; students can learn the proper way to write and format a professional letter. Because of the high volume of submissions received at Stone Soup, it’s a good idea to discuss expectations with your students. Even though a story is very good, it might not be accepted for publication. Editors are just people, like yourself, with personal tastes and opinions. It’s an adventure to send your work off to a magazine—you never know if you don’t try!
Creative Writing Models
The creative writing that appears in the pages of Stone Soup is the cream of the crop. From the hundreds of submissions we receive every month, only a handful are selected for publication. Family history, the loss of a beloved pet, starting over in a new school—these are just a few of the themes found in Stone Soup. Many teachers tell us they build their creative writing lessons around Stone Soup stories, focusing on such elements as plot, character development, dialogue, sense of place. A story in Stone Soup might remind a student of a similar experience in his or her own life that can form the basis of a story. Poems in Stone Soup are keenly observed, lyrical depictions of nature, the seasons, a special time of day, a life-changing moment. Are the trees bursting with color on a crisp fall day? With a Stone Soup poem as the starting point, take your students outside with pen and paper. Have them sit quietly for a while and write about what they see and feel. Back in the classroom, discuss what makes a good poem. How do your students’ poems compare with the poems in Stone Soup? How can they be better?
