Tricotomania and more

As I was loitering at the children’s information desk in the library today, I leafed through a magazine from the Children’s Book Centre they had sitting on the counter. In it I came across details of a contest associated with Children’s Book Week (November 15-22). The contest deadline is December 15th and winners will be announced in April. It is open to kids in grades 2 through 6 and since school is based so firmly on age, I’m assuming you just figure out which grade you kid would be in where s/he in school. Individual kids can enter. They encourage teachers (and librarians) to use this as a basis of activities but it looks like it is not necessary for entries to come through schools. Details can be found here. And there is a link to a PDF of the entry form on that page.

It seems that in this house the deadline imposed by a contest and the possibility of winning a $200 bookstore gift certificate are just the motivation needed to actually work hard on one piece of writing, going through the whole process of revision and so on. After the publishing experience, I should have figured this out sooner. Lots of writing happens but revision needs some external motivation.

With that in mind, I also started to look for other possibilities. The Royal Canadian Legion runs a contest for Remembrance Day, though it is unclear whether homeschoolers are eligible. I’ve e-mailed my local branch to ask, and to find out deadlines. I fear I’ve missed this year, since it is only a month away but maybe next year. I noticed a couple of books of poetry specifically on war and peace recently so a little unit on war poetry that includes writing some of our own might be a good idea.

A quick google search led me to the Canadian Authors Association page on writing contests though it is mostly for adult writers.  However, there is a youth category in the local branch contest for young people age 13-17 which isn’t that far off.

This page (at Wordwrights Canada) has some contests but only for 2007-08. There is an interesting one sponsored by Habitat for Humanity (a charity we support) on the meaning of home, deadline November 14th.

This one is not the right age group for us but if you have a child in grade 4 or 5, the World Literacy Council has an annual creative writing program linked to their Write to Read program. I found information on the TVO site.

Folks in Manitoba and Saskatchewan should keep an eye out for this year’s McNally Robinson Dear Canada contest for kids in grades 5 and 6. Last year’s deadline was in April. And GMAC seems to sponsor a contest with a spring deadline too but there doesn’t seem to be details of this year’s contest yet. A couple of different sources had links to this page, so maybe that’s the place to go when it comes back.

If anyone knows of others, shout out in the comments.

Todays post over at I.N.K. is fabulous. David Schwartz reports on all kinds of class projects kids have done based on his book If You Hopped Like A Frog. Some good ideas there for writing projects….

I am never sure whether most of my regular readers also read many of the same blogs that I do. Or each other’s blogs. So apologies if you have already seen this. Willa has some good quotes about writing up with a link to a George Orwell article. It looks very interesting. She promises to post her thoughts at some future date. I look forward to that. She often has thought provoking reflections.

Tigger and I have been doing the Kids Write Basic class with Bravewriter. It is very good. I highly recommend it. But then Julie’s philosophy is just a good fit for us.

Anyway, we are in the revising stage and I took some photos. Tigger has done a couple of freewrites, one of them expanding on a particular section of the first. I typed them up, each sentence beginning on a new line, and then she worked with the sentences to arrange them in the way she was most pleased with. A few were left out altogether. Here is what it looked like:

She’s posted some of her drafts over on her blog. I suspect the final version will go up over there, too. We still have some editing to do.

The process has been great. And it is fun seeing what other kids are writing. We now plan to take 4 pieces of writing a year through the whole revision process. Some of those will be on things we are learning. Others will be fiction she is writing.