Chris Eboch: Fiction Makes Learning Fun

Writers, teachers, and parents know that the way to get kids excited about reading and learning is to make reading and learning fun. This means telling exciting stories, not merely teaching boring lists of facts.

I often get e-mails from teachers who are using one of my historical novels in the classroom, and they report enthusiasms from the students. A teacher at a middle school in Washington state once told me, “We have been using your book, The Well of Sacrifice, as one of our lit circle books this year. Your book has been a very popular one for the kids … all levels of reading ability, and strongly supports our social studies theme.”

Offering a teaching guide can make it easier for teachers to incorporate your book into their classroom. One teacher used my Egyptian mystery, The Eyes of Pharaoh, in a gifted class of fourth and fifth graders in New Mexico. She said, “Using this historical fiction has been a window into Ancient Egypt – its people, culture, and beliefs. My class enjoyed doing research on Egyptian gods and goddesses, and hieroglyphs. Projects extended their knowledge of this fascinating time and place.”

Getting Your Guide

Today the educational buzzwords are Core Curriculum State Standards (CCSS), and lesson plans that align with those standards may have special appeal to teachers. It’s not hard to find educational experts who offer services in creating CCSS-aligned teaching material. Expect to pay $150-$250 and up, depending on the type of guide. Debbie Gonzales, who wrote the curriculum guide for The Eyes of Pharaoh, says, “Through the sharing of a well-crafted Curriculum Guide, we can be of tremendous support to educators in sharing our passion for the craft and our enthusiasm for reading by helping students hone their CCSS skills.”

You can also develop your own teaching guides if you’re willing to study the standards. “Most well-written books cover multiple CCSS and it’s easy to relate them to a good book,” says Shirley Duke, coauthor of Teaching STEM and Common Core with Mentor Texts, K-5, which illustrates how to do lesson plans and can serve as a template. “Read the CCSS standard and then consider how the book illustrates that idea.” Possibilities include everything from identifying theme to understanding cause and effect to identifying metaphors.

CCSS alignments aren’t the only possibility. Some states, such as Texas, have their own standards, and it might be worth researching those depending on your novel’s topic.

Beyond Language Arts

You might also have content that’s a better fit with social studies or science standards. I worked on a book called Walk like an Elephant along with a family interested in science. The book tells an exciting story about two kids helping to rescue a baby elephant in Africa. It’s also packed full of science information about animals, habitats, and much more. The teaching guide I helped develop has Common Core literacy tie-ins for each chapter, plus science projects on ecosystems, food webs, and the scientific method. We also included ways young people can help save the elephants – a great way to teach them science, social studies, and civic action.

Spellbound River Press, a new company, is releasing teaching guides for each of its books. The first list includes the re-release of The Ghost Miner’s Treasure, the fourth in my Haunted series. That teaching guide has discussion questions that cover everything from science to ethics. It also has some writing and mapmaking projects. The teaching guides for The Sweet Spot and Magic Mayhem: Jinnie Wishmaker focus more on understanding characters, while Operation Golden Llama will have an extensive guide that covers vocabulary, comprehension, and questions about Peru. It also has writing projects and an excerpt for theater.

Novels can be used to teach almost any concept you can find in the classroom. Ask teachers what would help them in the classroom. Or if you’re lucky enough to already have teachers using your book, see if they’ll share their projects with you and allow you to share them with other teachers.

Another teacher who used The Well of Sacrifice in her fourth/fifth grade classroom said, “This book is not only a great adventure for middle grade readers, but it is a useful tool for classroom teachers…. We used the book as the backbone of several language arts exercises such as: written and oral reports about the Maya; literary criticism of characters, plot, and sequence; persuasive essays on human sacrifice vs. murder and Mayan culture vs. our own culture; and art projects from wood burning to mapping. We studied geography and the rainforest. The students’ enthusiasm for this book pushed our curriculum into other disciplines including math.”

Wow, what lucky students!

Something for Every Student

Enthusiastic teachers get students involved with a text through a wide variety of projects, some clearly academic and some that appear to be mainly for fun. Students enjoy drawing cartoons or developing skits of scenes in the book. Persuasive letters or group discussions get a playful boost by having the students write or speak from the point of view of one of the book’s characters. Some teachers plan a party (perhaps with accompanying author visit) to wrap up use of the book. Parents may send in appropriate snacks, and the kids give presentations, using posters or dioramas to illustrate their areas of research.

To some, this may not look as educational as reading textbooks and memorizing information. However, people learn in a wide variety of ways. Some are more visual, benefiting from seeing lots of images. Others are verbal, learning well from words in speech and writing. Yet others need physical activity to help lock in information. Some students may learn best in social groups, while others work better on their own. Using a variety of projects in the classroom offers something to all of the students.

Lesson plans

What do you do after you develop your lesson plans? You have to get them into the hands of teachers. I offer mine on my website and also make them available for free on sites where teachers can find lesson plans, Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers (you’ll have to open accounts). If you have other ideas of where to share lesson plans, or how to let teachers know about them, please post in the comments.

For lesson plans for The Eyes of Pharaoh and The Well of Sacrifice, visit my website’s for teachers page. For lesson plans for The Ghost Miner’s Treasure and other books coming out from Spellbound River Press, visit the SRP For Teachers page. The other series launching this spring are Cousins in Action: Operation Golden Llama by Sam Bond, Magic Mayhem: Jinnie Wishmaker by Deanna Roy, and The Sweet Spot by Stacy Barnett Mozer.

Resources

Teaching STEM and Common Core with Mentor Texts: Collaborative Lesson Plans, K-5, by

Anastasia Suen and Shirley Duke

Writing for the Common Core: Writing, Language, Reading, and Speaking & Listening Activities Aligned to the Common Core, by Darcy Pattison

CCSS: http://www.corestandards.org/

Which states have adopted CCSS: http://www.corestandards.org/standards-in-your-state/

The Next Generation Science Standards (NSTA): http://ngss.nsta.org/

Geography for Life Standards: http://www.nhga.net/new-geography-for-life-standards/

National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies: http://www.socialstudies.org/standards  

Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a hierarchy of thinking skills, with examples of questions for each level, from knowledge to evaluation:

http://www.bloomstaxonomy.org/Blooms%20Taxonomy%20questions.pdf

Marcie Colleen’s website offers a free download of Picture Book Month Teachers Guide, which shows how picture books can work with CCSS. http://www.thisismarciecolleen.com/my-teachers-guides.html

Share My Lesson: http://www.sharemylesson.com/

Teachers Pay Teachers: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/

SCBWI’s The Book lists people who do curriculum and book club guides under “Resources for Published Authors & Illustrators.”

Chris Eboch’s novels for ages nine and up include The Eyes of Pharaoh, a mystery in ancient Egypt; The Well of Sacrifice, a Mayan adventure; The Genie’s Gift, a middle eastern fantasy; and the Haunted series, about kids who travel with a ghost hunter TV show.

Chris’s writing craft books include You Can Write for Children: How to Write Great Stories, Articles, and Books for Kids and Teenagers, and Advanced Plotting. Learn more at www.chriseboch.com or her Amazon page, or check out her writing tips at her Write Like a Pro! blog.

How Do You Learn? – a post by Chris Eboch

What's the best way to learn?

It depends on each individual's optimal learning style. Some of us do well with printed material – books, magazines, blog posts. (There is even debate about learning from printed books versus electronic formats.) Others do better listening to an instructor. Some need visuals, or must be physically involved in an activity.

Do an Internet search on "learning styles" to find out more. You can also try a quick online survey to find your learning style here. (FYI, I came out at 92% linguistic and also scored highly in intrapersonal and interpersonal, but low in musical and visual-spatial. So I guess I should talk to people.)

If you’re a writer, understanding your learning style may help you improve your craft. Should you be taking live classes or is an online correspondence school a better fit? Can you really learn everything you need to know just from reading books on the craft?

There's also a relatively new technology gaining steam: webinars.

 At the recent SCBWI Summer Conference in Los Angeles, the subject of webinars came up during the regional advisor meeting. Small regions were especially interested, as they may not have the money and attendance numbers to pay for bringing in speakers. Webinars are also good for spread-out regions, or even large, active regions that want to make classes more accessible to those who live outside the main urban areas. And webinars can work well for people who simply have a hard time leaving home, for whatever reason – needing to care for children or aging parents, health problems, difficulty driving at night.

Last Tuesday, I presented a webinar on Writing for Children's Magazines for the combined SCBWI Texas regions. They are holding webinars every other month, and people outside of Texas can also sign up. (SCBWI members pay $10, others pay $35.) I have a three-hour webinar set up in September for the Caribbean regions. Since the Caribbean has members spread out over multiple islands, it would be nearly impossible to bring everyone together for an event. And a live event would be too expensive, because of the travel costs, for both speakers and attendees.

I've also done webinars through a company called Delve Writing. We are experimenting with what works best as a business model, whether it's a class that meets once a week for several weeks, or a single class. I expect to have a couple of workshop options set up this fall.

By the time this posts, I'll be in Connecticut, at the International Women's Writing Guild retreat. There I'll be teaching a workshop on plotting that meets for four days in a row, leading critique groups, and participating in a Q&A panel on traditional and indie publishing. I'm looking forward to hanging out with other writers in person. I enjoy being able to see my students. It's nice to walk among them while they do exercises, so I can offer extra help to those who need it. Given the choice, I’d present live.

But living in the center of New Mexico, travel is an expense and hassle. Being able to offer lower-cost workshops online is a great option, for me and students.

If you would like to be added to my mailing list for writing workshops, sign up by sending an e-mail to me through my website contact page.)

What I Learned; What the Kids Learned by Dianne Salerni

I’ve been sharing stories of My Adventures in Publishing with my fifth grade classes ever since my first book was published – well, even before that – back before anything I wrote even came close to getting published. But this year was different.

In September, I told my students what I was working on – the story of a boy who discovers an extra day between Wednesday and Thursday and a mysterious girl hiding in the house next door who exists only on that secret day. They went nuts for the idea and wanted me to read it to them, but I declined, because I had written it as a YA story and there were inappropriate bits.

But they kept clamoring for the story, and when my agent got back to me and told me how much she loved the manuscript – BUT she thought it really ought to be written for MG – I knew immediately that she was right. Revisions commenced at once, and I hesitantly agreed to read the new version to my class when it was ready. This would be the first time I’d ever read one of my manuscripts to a class, and I was extremely nervous – even worried that parents might complain I was hawking my books. (This was not the case. Parents told me how excited their children were to getting a privileged peek at the book.)

The sale came in October, after an email from HarperCollins that arrived right before my last class of the day and stunned me to the point where I could barely teach. I shared the basics with my students – the 3 book deal, the enthusiastic compliments from the editor – but I also admitted I was nervous. Certain changes were mentioned in the offer, and I told the class, “I’m not sure if I’ll like these revisions.”

One of my students raised his hand. “Didn’t you tell us you already made a lot of revisions and ended up loving them all?” he asked. And he was right, of course. I had told them that, and furthermore, it was true. I could have hugged him.

I learned right then that students actually listen to what I say. They believe me. And they can even repeat back my own words exactly when I need to hear them. They root for me, and they believe in me. Needless to say, I completed those requested revisions, and LOVED them.

A couple days ago, I asked my students what they learned from following this book’s path to publication this year. Here’s what they said:

1. It takes a long, long time for a book to get published. Too long!!! (They have already seen a sneak peek at the proposed cover design and can’t believe the release date is still over a year away.)

2. You have to revise and revise and revise. Sometimes you have to revise things you don’t want to revise, but then you’ll probably like the changes anyway.

3. You don’t get to have your book just the way you want it. You have to collaborate with your editors and everybody else at your publisher.

4. The author doesn’t say what goes on the cover.

5. You have to have patience, time, and a tough skin, because people might criticize and say hurtful things about your book.

6. You don’t just send your book in to a publisher and they publish it. Sometimes they say no.

And perhaps the most important one …

7. You may be the teacher who tells us when we make mistakes, but when you are the author you make mistakes, too.

"Weird Crap" (Final Chain Story)

In a recent post, I discussed the idea of the chain story activity. If you missed it, feel free to go back and give it a read. Here is the final result, a story called "Weird Crap"

[Original Beginning by Mike Winchell] Spill Joseph had always thought of himself as a stand-up kinda guy. A good friend. A pal. A dude. A bro. That’s how he saw himself, even after he’d been forced to tell his parents who had tied Kitt’s tail to the ceiling fan and flicked the “super speed” switch. Nick Gname, for the record, had done the tail tying and cat hanging. Sam Chowder, the switch flicking. As he had explained to his parents, Spill had just been “…in the room, like, coincidentally. You know, just hangin’ out. Chillin’. That kinda thing.”

It wasn’t until Oracle, his pet parrot, started chanting, “Rat! Ahhh! Rat! Ahhh! Rat! Ahhh!” that Spill realized what he’d done. That’s when reality hit Spill like a three-hundred-pound linebacker.

The reality was, when he went to school the next day and all his classmates, including Nick and Sam, knew he’d ratted out his two best friends, well, that’s when the Kitt was gonna hit the fan. Again.

[Contributed by Matthew MacNish] In fact, the Kitt, and the fan for that matter, might not be the only things getting hit. Spill was confident, certain even, that Nick, or Sam, or Nick and Sam, would probably corner him outside, and a circle of kids chanting "fight," would gather faster than a fan spinning at "super speed."

[Contributed by Hilary Wagner] How could he waylay such an event? Play sick, fall to the ground moaning? No, they wouldn’t buy that, but taking his punishment like a man didn’t seem like a wise option either. After all, he liked breathing too much.

[Contributed by Connie B. Dowell] All night poor Spill thought and thought. He paced his room. He turned the ceiling fan on, then off again. It didn't help. Finally, at two in the morning, just as he managed to close his eyes to sleep, he had it. No need for playing sick, nor getting his butt kicked either. It would be easy... that is if he could play the part convincingly.

[Contributed by Susan Kaye Quinn] The next morning, he carefully applied the junk to his neck: a thin layer of tacky glue, some awful, yellow eye-makeup and concealer he stole from his drama queen sister's room, and a squirt of fake blood he'd found in the basement. He smudged it around until it looked just right, all gory and awesome. Spill admired his handiwork in the mirror for a while.

Total zombie bite.

He carefully covered it up with a black turtleneck his gram had bought him last year. Like that wouldn't be noticed in April!

His mom called out Breakfast's ready, and he grinned all the way downstairs.

[Contributed by Paul Michael Murphy] There were only two reasons to wear a turtleneck, and Spill was counting on his mom not wanting to embarrass either of them by asking if he had a hickey or if he'd been invited to a poetry reading. But when she glanced up from the pan of scrambled eggs and her lips started to part, Spill said, "It's for school. I'm giving a report on Steve Jobs. We get extra credit for dressing like our topic."

Mom dropped him off at Cadbury Academy for the Overprotected twenty minutes later. Sam and Nick were waiting for him by the monkey bar dome, which Spill always thought looked like a futuristic prison cell. They wore camouflage. Spill saw them anyway. Well, time for the show.

Spill moaned in the deepest, most guttural way he could and tore at his turtleneck as if it were choking him (which it was, of course). He ripped it over his head and snapped into zombie mode. Dragging his left leg behind him, he lurched across the blacktop. A kindergarten girl screeched as Spill lunged for her. Spill growled and allowed a thin line of drool to slip from his mouth as he advanced toward Nick and Sam. Little kids scattered out of his way, terrified.

A whistle blew. Mrs. Tuntruck had spotted him. Crap.

[Contributed by John Zeleznik] Mrs. Tuntruck looked much the way you'd expect her to. Big, blocky and determined. She thumped towards Spill with a look on her face that suggested it would've been better off to take what he had coming to him from Sam and Nick. He moaned and it came out sounding strange. Deep. Guttural. Like a real zombie. What happened next wasn't exactly what Spill thought was going to happen.

Tuntruck turned and trucked, grabbing up the little girl by the waist of her pants and screaming "ZOMBIE!"

Now Spill had no idea that Mrs. Tuntruck had just read the hot novel about the zombie apocalypse. He had no idea that Tuntruck had a "thing" about zombies. And when the school resource officer came charging out of the building, he moaned again. This wasn't the way this was supposed to go.

"Weird Crap"...A Chain Story

One thing I do occasionally in the classroom is chain writing, which asks different writers to write different sentences, or paragraphs, one after another. There are variations to the activity, like, for example, doing it blind, which means everyone has a number on one side of the paper, and then they write the sentence or paragraph on the other side. After all the sentences/paragraphs have been written, you use the numbers to put everything together (it's "blind" because you write your part without knowing anything else that has been written). It's a cool activity, and the students usually enjoy it. 

So that explains what a chain story is. Now let me explain the "weird crap" part.

A while back, a critique partner of mine read something I had written, and he commented that it seemed like I was writing what someone else wanted me to write, not what I enjoyed writing, and not what I was "great" at. He commented, "You do well with high-concept MG, and you're great writing about weird crap. So why this?" I laughed out loud, because I knew the dude was right. Not only was the project a forced pile of dung, but he was also right because the crap I write is rather weird, and I have fun with that sort of thing.

So here is what I want to do. Let's take the weird crap idea and throw it in a bowl with the chain story process, and then let's flush it all out and see what we get. In other words, let's write a chain story...and hope it doesn't end up falling in line with the aforementioned metaphor. I'll start the story below, and volunteer writers (you) will continue the story in the comments section. Here's the process.

1) Read the opening below to get a feel for tone, POV, characters, etc.
2) Where I left off, comment number 1 will write the next paragraph in the story.
3) The next comment will include the paragraph after that.
4) Next comment, next paragraph. 
5) When I see that the chain story has gone as far as it will go (no more paragraphs/comments for a couple days) I will combine everything and post the final product at a later date.

You game? Come on, let's have some fun.

"Weird Crap" OPENING 

Spill Joseph had always thought of himself as a stand-up kinda guy. A good friend. A pal. A dude. A bro. That’s how he saw himself, even after he’d been forced to tell his parents who had tied Kitt’s tail to the ceiling fan and flicked the “super speed” switch. Nick Gname, for the record, had done the tail tying and cat hanging. Sam Chowder, the switch flicking. As he had explained to his parents, Spill had just been “…in the room, like, coincidentally. You know, just hangin’ out. Chillin’. That kinda thing.”

It wasn’t until Oracle, his pet parrot, started chanting, “Rat! Ahhh! Rat! Ahhh! Rat! Ahhh!” that Spill realized what he’d done. That’s when reality hit Spill like a three-hundred-pound linebacker.

The reality was, when he went to school the next day and all his classmates, including Nick and Sam, knew he’d ratted out his two best friends, well, that’s when the Kitt was gonna hit the fan. Again.

To be continued...by you!

Okay, go at it. New comment, new paragraph.

My Teacher Lens

Now that I’m back at the day job (teaching junior high ELA), I find myself looking at books through my teacher lens, and not my writer lens. This is a different view, since the teacher in me looks for books by other authors (not my own books) that elicit great joy in my students as readers. It’s critical that the books I recommend to my students be ones that inspire them to pick up another book. And then another book. And another. And another. Otherwise, if my recommendations are off, that trust is gone and I might end up creating students who don’t want to read. And that’s not cool.

I’m very well-read when it comes to MG and YA, so it’s often rather easy for me to recommend books to my students. I even offer my own copies as well. Last year I was loaning my copies of HUNGER GAMES and MAZE RUNNER to students. I had more than a few students salivating for future books in the series. That’s pretty darn cool to see: students getting “into” reading based on books I got “into” myself. I just handed off a list of about 20 books that weren’t in our library to our librarian and told her, “These books are ones that hook young readers, so we need them.” Books by my fellow Mayhemers were included on this list, along with books that we’ve reviewed over the last year or so (by the way, I have a book review coming up on September 28^th for a book called RETURN TO EXILE, by E.J. Patten, so look for that). 

When I recommend books to students, first I’ll ask them for books they enjoyed in the past. That helps me come up with comps that I can recommend. For example, if a student says he liked ARTEMIS FOWL, I can guess he might dig FABLEHAVEN, or perhaps the GREGOR series. If a student says she likes the TWILIGHT books, I might recommend P.C. and Kristin Cast’s books or Heather Brewer’s VLADIMIR TOD books, which I personally favor over Meyer’s books. If a student likes Mike Lupica’s sports books, I might recommend Tim Green’s sports books. Then there are those books that I just recommend to all my students because I love them: like EMERALD ATLAS and the CIRQUE du FREAK series (underrated series, in my opinion).

So now I turn to you to help my students. If you’d be so kind, give me your recommendations, perhaps the top 5 in any MG or YA genre (like your “Top 5 YA Paranormal” or your “Top 5 MG Fantasy”) and I’ll pull these recommendations and pass them along to my students. Make them good, though. My students’ reading future depends on YOU!