New Look

To celebrate the blog's new look, I'm uploading a slideshow of images taken by students at Thomas Tallis School this year that have featured on their Flickr photoblogs. This really is a very small sample of a host of exciting pictures. It would be great to collaborate on a shared project involving images and text so that young people have a chance of making a transatlantic creative connection.

Slideshow

Here's a slideshow of recent mural work.

Short Stories

I have connection with a vice president of an elementary school who has great enthusiasm in foreign language education. He will be more than happy to use short stories from writers to educate his students about literacy and the English language, as they are not fluent.

WeBook

I'm not sure if you know of this site already but I've just stumbled across it and thought of you immediately. WeBook claims to be a new kind of publisher:

"WEbook is the vision of a few occasionally erudite people who believe there are millions of talented writers whose work is ignored by the staid and exclusive world of book publishing. It just makes sense: If you create a dynamic, irreverent, and open place for writers and readers to meet, write, react, and think together, the results will be extraordinary. Cue WEbook.com, an online book publishing company that allows writers, editors, reviewers, illustrators, and others to join forces to create great works of fiction and non-fiction, thrillers and essays, short stories, children's books and more."

I had a quick look around the site and thought this was a great idea for anyone suffering from writer's block. What really caught my attention was the possibility of collaborating on a publication featuring text and images. Do you think this is something we could try together?

The power of imagination

I'm reading Ken Robinson's excellent book "The Element" at the moment and I came across this statement this morning which seemed to relate to our recent discussions about sharing transatlantic perceptions:

"We don't just see the world as it is; we interpret it through the particular ideas and beliefs that have shaped our own cultures and our personal outlook. All of these stand between us and our raw experiences on the world, acting as a filter on what we perceive and how we think."

I'm really excited by the idea of exchanging beliefs, either in the form of podcasts or even skype enabled webcasts. Let me know how far you've got with your planning so we can shape something together.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Harmony Middle School

Monday morning I went to visit Ronda Hassig, a school librarian at Harmony Middle School. I met Ronda last year at Shane Evans Studio in Kansas City, MO. She was there showcasing the artwork & poetry her 7th grade english students created during the on site residency of poet Bonnie Lynn Tolson.

The project was based around 'homelessness' and the importance of understanding--being empathetic to plights of others. Bonnie worked with Ronda's students and the end result was poetry depicting the students' understanding of what it means to be homeless.

Harmony With Voice was published as the end result. 77 pages of student poetry... and the creativity doesn't stop there...

The students have been paired with art students, who have or will create empty bowls that reflect the sentiment or "golden line" from each specific poem. These bowls will be auctioned off in two weeks at a silent auction. All proceeds will go to TruLight, a homeless shelter in Kansas City, MO.

I hung out in Ronda's library for two hours and alongside picking up all this great creative information, I was able observe Ronda interacting with her students.... and I must say I left her library smilin' and inspired.

A Visit?

Hello Jon!

My name is Leslie Goodwin and I work with Angel at the Central Resource Library. Currently I am interning here for College credit hours. I am the facilitator for the Creative Commons group here, which is a creative writing group that meets once a month at the library.

Angel and I have been hitting our heads against the wall attempting to figure out a way to connect with the students in London. After a couple of concussions Angel and I have finally come up with some ideas that we wanted to run by you.

First off, I want to create a sort of Pen Pal system with your students. Three of the females in my Creative Commons group (along with me) want to start a creative inspiration process with your students. We want to write pieces and then send them to your students, who will then read them, and be inspired to either take photographs, draw pictures, or do some creative aspect and then send it back to us. Where we will then look at the pieces they have sent and be inspired to write more pieces. Each of us would have one person who we creatively connect with (so the pen pal effect comes into play here).

We would like to do this in the upcoming spring. With that said, we have an even bigger hurdle to leap. Angel and I want to actually do some fund raising and come to London and meet you and the students involved in Kreate and Konnect. We're aiming for it to be at the beginning of August and we would like to stay for a week to ten days.

What we would like to know from you is what dates would be the best for us to potentially come and visit, we would like to know how many of your students are willing to do this with us, how we could meet online possibly (video chat), and what other ideas you have that could make this even bigger.

The last thing I would like to mention is that I have a young man in my Creative Common group who is from Korea and he believes that he knows a teacher there who would love to make this communication a triangle effect, so that we have yet another group in the world that we are creatively inspiring.

We would love to hear your ideas about this possibility.

I hope you have a wonderful day!

: )

-Leslie