Wholehearted Teaching Ideas have Migrated to Teachers Pay Teachers

I now have a store on Teachers Pay Teachers called Wholehearted English Curriculum. If you followed me here years ago, you may want to follow me there, as I upload my teaching resources from over 18 years of wholehearted teaching English Language Arts, Creative Writing, and Journalism.

new website

Check out my new website at: https://carolinensimpson.com

an excerpt from my forthcoming chapbook, Choose Your Own Adventure and Other Poems

Choose Your Own Adventure:

The Galápagos Mating Dance

You are a single woman, about to embark upon your most challenging and dangerous mission. Equipped with a libido and the instinct to bear children, your objective is to find the perfect mating ritual in the Galápagos Islands. You bravely face elaborate courtship dances, rough foreplay, and single parenting – but will you return to the U.S. with the partnership pattern that works for you?

Chapter One

You are a blue-footed booby.

A male approaches you 

and begins to dance,

taking giant steps in place

to flaunt his turquoise feet,

indicators of his health.

If red throat pouches 

are more of a turn-on,

skip to Chapter Two.

He offers you twigs and grasses,

symbols of the nest 

you will build together.

Impressed, you dance too, 

face-to-face walking 

on a treadmill.

You mirror each movement, 

a connection found 

in how much you can act 

like one another.

His dancing escalates-

wingtips, tail, beak 

all point skywards.

When you match 

his sky pointing,

the bond is sealed.

He whistles; you honk.

Even after nesting begins,

you continue to dance.

If you would rather 

he stop trying to get it on,

so you can focus 

on being a mom,

skip to Chapter Three.

You both incubate the eggs,

taking breaks only to hunt.

While you are off to eat,

he strays from the nest,

dances the booby-two-step

with other females,

but when you return,

he comes back immediately.

If you prefer a partner 

who can abstain 

from flirting with others,

go to Chapter Two.

Your family stays together

six months, one season.

Once the juvenile leaves the nest,

you both move on to new mates-

no empty nest syndrome for you.

If you prefer a partner 

to grow old with,

rekindling the romance

once the kids are gone,

skip to Chapter Six.

ORDER YOUR COPY ONLINE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/choose-your-own-adventure-and-other-poems-by-caroline-n-simpson/

The Curious Creative: Week 52

Dream Board

This is the fifty-second and final installment of The Curious Creative, weekly 10-minute writing exercises for busy individuals interested in exploring their creativity. For the complete rationale, click here. 

My Thoughts:

“Each sound that we emit travels through the air, but it always returns to us. If we want the right words to resound in our ears, all we have to do is pronounce them beforehand.” –Laura Esquival

Dream boards are collages of words and images that represent one’s vision or hopes for the future. They operate on the law of attraction, that by consciously “pronouncing” your hopes and dreams, you will attract them into actualization. Since this is the last of The Curious Creative exercises, number 52, you will most likely be doing this at the turn of the new year. What a fitting time for our creative play to consist of our dreams for the coming year!

Your Turn!

1. Gather some scissors, and a stack of magazines, old books, newspapers, etc. from which to find your images.

2. As you leaf through the magazines, etc., cut out pictures and words that catch your eye or speak to you. Envision what you want the coming year to look like for you. At this point, it’s better to gather too many words and images and then when it’s time to choose which to include on your dream board, you can make more careful selections. What’s important at this stage is not to think too hard or long about why to cut out an image or word. Trust your intuition.

3. Choose a blank piece of paper as small or as large as you want your dream board to be.

4. Look through your words and images, and again without thinking too hard, arrange them into a meaningful collage of what you hope the coming year will bring. You can also use markers, colored pencils, pens, etc. to write and draw images yourself.

5. When you are finished, hang the dream board in a place where you can be reminded every day of what your vision for the future is. I like to hang mine in my closet so I see it every morning as I start my day.

How did you do? Were you able to shut off your thinking brain and choose words and pictures from a relaxed state? Did any of the things you chose to cut out or draw surprise you? Check back on your dream board in six months or so- which things came true?

To encourage each other and grow a community of Curious Creatives, sign in from a google account so you can share your creation in the comment box below. Also, if you subscribe to this blog (submit your email address in the "Follow this Site by Email" box to the right), you will get an email update whenever a new exercise is added. Thanks for playing!

The Curious Creative: Week 51

What-Ifs

This is the fifty-first installment of The Curious Creative, weekly 10-minute writing exercises for busy individuals interested in exploring their creativity. For the complete rationale, click here. 

My Thoughts:

What would happen if…? What would it be like if…? Science fiction writers explore what-ifs. Mystery novelists play with how one event affects the natural course of things. Poets and essayists can also use such questions to inspire their writing.  Writing from what-if questions requires analysis and imagination, a meeting of both brain hemispheres, and so it can be a great source of creative play.

Your Turn!

1. Start this creative exercise by getting out of the house. Take a walk down your street and comb your surroundings for salient details. Maybe you will notice a car that’s lost its side view mirror or a single shoe in someone’s front yard.

2. Choose one of the things you noticed as your idea starter. From imagination, create a flow chart of the events leading up to it.

3. Begin a story or poem that describes the unlikely phenomena leading up to the detail you noticed on your street. 

How did you do? Did getting outside, taking a walk, and paying close attention to your surroundings put you in a different mental state? Is there anything worth excavating from your started poem or essay? Did the exercise remind you of playing pretend as a child?

To encourage each other and grow a community of Curious Creatives, sign in from a google account so you can share your creation in the comment box below. Also, if you subscribe to this blog (submit your email address in the "Follow this Site by Email" box to the right), you will get an email update whenever a new exercise is added. Thanks for playing!

Inspired by: Michael C. Smith and Suzanne Greenberg’s “Implausible Causes and Unlikely Effects,” Everyday Creative Writing: Panning for Gold in the Kitchen Sink, 2^nd edition, p. 170-172.

The Curious Creative: Week 50

Childhood Play

This is the fiftieth installment of The Curious Creative, weekly 10-minute writing exercises for busy individuals interested in exploring their creativity. For the complete rationale, click here. 

My Thoughts:

I came across this Friedrich Nietzsche quotation when I was a teenager and I held on to it tightly: “Man’s maturity: to regain the seriousness he had as a child at play.” At the time, it was a reminder to stay young and playful, to hold off on “adulting.” Nowadays, as a writer, I often think of creativity as a harkening back to the state of childhood play. As Nietzsche pointed out, play was neither half-hearted nor frivolous; it had intensity and focus perhaps unrivaled in adulthood. When in the flow of creating something, it’s that same dichotomy of intensity and playfulness that often leads me to an inspired piece of art. For this week’s Curious Creative, we’ll do a simple listing exercise to bring us back to our childhood worlds of play.

Your Turn!

1. Open your notebook to two empty pages side by side. Create seven columns and label them: BOOKS, OBJECTS, FICTIONAL CHARACTERS, TEACHERS, GAMES, ACTIVITIES, and OBSERVATIONS. 

2. Spent 10 minutes filling in each column with as many examples from your childhood as possible. My own example: 

BOOKS	OBJECTS	FICTIONAL CHARACTERS	TEACHERS	GAMES	ACTIVITIES	OBSERVATIONS
-Anne of Green Gables -Little House on the Prairie -Forever -Where the Wild Things Are	-rock collection -butterfly net -pogo stick -stilts -Barbies -Cabbage Patch Kids	-Jem -Ariel -Belle -Anne	-Mrs. Donohue -Mrs. Brandt -Mrs. Hofgesang -Mrs. Polio	-Kick the Can -Capture the Flag -Super Mario Brothers -Tetris -Man Hunt -Candyland	-I made clothes out of paper and tape for crickets I collected from the garage. -I raised Painted Lady Butterflies from eggs my mom ordered.	-People liked hanging out with you if you were funny. -Playing video games for a couple hours was fun, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. -I was the fastest girl runner I knew.

How did you do? Did you enjoy reminiscing about your childhood? Did it feel playful to remember? Did remembering remind you to be more playful?

To encourage each other and grow a community of Curious Creatives, sign in from a google account so you can share your creation in the comment box below. Also, if you subscribe to this blog (submit your email address in the "Follow this Site by Email" box to the right), you will get an email update whenever a new exercise is added. Thanks for playing!

Inspired by: Linda Barry’s Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014)

The Curious Creative: Week 49

Four-Panel Diary

This is the forty-ninth installment of The Curious Creative, weekly 10-minute writing exercises for busy individuals interested in exploring their creativity. For the complete rationale, click here. 

My Thoughts:

In Lynda Barry’s cartooning class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “What It Is,” about halfway through the semester, she assigns her students “the four-panel diary.” On each diary page, students illustrate four scenes from that day, including “daily things” and “things that stand out.” 

I very much like what Barry writes about the purpose of this activity: “Both writing and drawing lean on a certain kind of picturing—not the kind that is already finished in your head and just needs to be put to words or reproduced on paper. It’s a kind of picturing that is formed by our own activity, one line suggesting the next. We have a general direction but can’t see where we are until we let ourselves take a step, and then another, and then we move on to the third… You don't know what your drawings will be like until you draw them with this kind of picturing in your mind that moves your hand. The trick is just that: Let it move your hand.”

Her directive to “let it move your hand” is very apropos to the generative stages of writing. You must surrender to not knowing what the finished product will be until it appears at the end. This surrender is central to the creative process (and addictively fun!). For this week’s Curious Creative exercise, we will adapt Barry’s activity to writing.

Your Turn!

1. Divide a piece of paper into four equal quadrants.

2. If you are an early morning creative, think about the day before. If you are doing this in the evening, reflect on the day you’ve just had. For this particular activity, it’s better to do the latter.

3. In each panel, time yourself to write a 2-minute description of a scene or image from your day. Do not tell a chronological narrative of something that happened. Simply imagine a scene, a flashbulb memory if you will, and use words to describe what you see. 

4. These scenes don’t have to be the most exciting moments of your life; you can even focus on “pouring milk on your cereal,” as Lynda Barry suggests. The important thing is that you capture a scene in your mind’s eye, even if the picture is terribly fuzzy, and for two minutes, describe it with words on the page. 

How did you do? Did you let the process sweep you away, not knowing what you’d write until the description appeared in each panel? Were you able to actually imagine a visual picture in your mind’s eye for each panel? Did you notice interplay between image and word?

To encourage each other and grow a community of Curious Creatives, sign in from a google account so you can share your creation in the comment box below. Also, if you subscribe to this blog (submit your email address in the "Follow this Site by Email" box to the right), you will get an email update whenever a new exercise is added. Thanks for playing!

Inspired by: Linda Barry’s Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014)