Here's a recap of the For Your Journal writing prompts I posted August through October 2011 in case you missed out on one.
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August
Write a letter to your child. Is it hard to be a mom? Read the entire prompt here.
What rules should be established regarding children and social networking sites? Should the rules by driven by the family or the government? Write an opinion piece, citing a personal example to support your position. Read the entire prompt here.
Write about one of your cousins. Describe a time you were together as children and another time you met as adults. Read the entire prompt here.
September
How are you teaching your children to respect and care for nature? Write about a time your child experienced the "awe" of nature. Read the entire prompt here.
Look at your child's bookshelf and list one book, story, or poem for each virtue listed above. Write two or three sentences about each choice, describing the message or moral it teaches. Read the entire prompt here.
Write a story with your child. Cast him/her as the superhero and ask "What evil deed will you make right today?" Read the entire prompt here.
October
Write about the first trimester of pregnancy. At what point did you share your news with friends and family? What issues did you take into consideration before spreading the word? Read the entire prompt here.
Write about a conversation you had with your child about the day's news. Incorporate as much of the actual dialogue as possible. Read the entire prompt here.
Write about a learning experience that made an impact. How did the presenter make the lesson "real?" Read the entire prompt here.
Do you keep a journal - or wish you could get one started? Literary Mama wants to help.
Three times a month, I'll post a writing prompt. Open a notebook and write for 10 minutes. Don't worry about grammar or punctuation - just write. Then let the writing simmer and your mind wander for awhile.
And who knows? Maybe you'll discover a character for your next short story or a theme for a narrative essay. Or maybe you'll use the idea to create a special holiday card or photo album for someone in your family. However you decide to use your journal entry, I know you'll enjoy re-reading it months--and years--down the road.
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I stand in the school supplies aisle of our local drugstore while my two teenagers count out the number of spiral notebooks, folders, pencils, and pens they need to start the academic year. Neither needs a box of crayons, colored pencils, or markers, yet I find myself studying the choices and inhaling a little deeper than normal, hoping to catch a whiff of the more exotic shades of apricot, mountain meadow, and wisteria.
Even though our kitchen drawer of end-of-the-year school supplies is filled with broken crayons and dried-out markers left over from the past 10 years of elementary and middle school, I'm tempted to add a box of colored pencils or markers to our shopping cart. I know we don't have any of the metallic or neon variety.
"How about a package of these silver and gold markers?" I ask no one in particular. "Wouldn't they be fun to use to jazz up a poster or a report?"
Both look my way; neither responds.
But I've tapped into a memory.
"Remember when we had these?" my daughter points to a package of window markers. "Ally and I had so much fun with them. And it took you forever to get the windows clean."
She turned away with a sigh and a barely audible, "I wish she hadn't moved away."
Later that afternoon, I find her lying on her bedroom floor. She's opened an old coloring book of geometric shapes and surrounded herself with blunt-ended colored pencils.
"I just thought I'd finish this," she explains. "I don't know why I stopped coloring it."
I didn't see her for nearly an hour.
Journal Entry: Print out one of the suggested coloring pages (circles, crescents, rectangles) and color it. Write about the color choices you made and the medium you chose. What did you think about while you were coloring?
P.S. Are your color choices in America's Top 50 Favorites? Find out here.
Literary Reflections is pleased to present our featured writing prompt response from November. Earlier this month, we asked you to write about your transformation from childhood to adulthood in terms of how you interact with your parents and to describe a specific experience in which you saw your mother or father through the adult eyes of admiration and respect. What effect has that experience had on how you are raising your children?
Merle Huerta wrote:
Fatherly Advice
Long after multiple-system atrophy, a central nervous system disease, robbed my father of his continence, virility, and final breath, I realized that I had adopted his values. A pharmacist by profession, my father worked in Camden, New Jersey, one of the most poverty-stricken, crime-ridden cities in the U.S. Despite a job without benefits, he worked 12-hour shifts, sometimes seven-days a week. He loved it. The poor who relied upon his advice, medications and salves he measured or mixed by hand, and on the drugstore that was part "Variety" and pharmacy, called him "Doc." He reciprocated their adoration with hugs; and, despite twice being held up at gun-point, he continued to deliver groceries and pharmaceuticals to their homes, if illness prevented them from coming to him.
As I child, I listened to his diatribes about those who had hurt him. My mother, the principal character, had left him in 1963, remarried, and took me to another state. With each retelling, he described the broken couch and the orphan plate with a half-eaten tuna sandwich, she'd left him when she moved out. I tired of the stories; as a teenager, I vowed never to become a bitter, angry adult like him. I shied away, determined to reinvent myself. He was hurt by my detachment. I felt justified. But Edmund Burke, a 1700s philosopher and British Statesman understood all too well, that "those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." That's precisely what I did.
In 2001, I lost custody of my children after a contested custody battle. Two months after the judge's decision, my ex-husband quietly moved the children to another state. For years, paralyzed by the loss, I brewed, ruminating over perceived personality flaws that led to my loss. I had walked in my father's footsteps.
But, I had also become the best of him. After completing a masters and a nonfiction writing program, I taught English skills at a SUNY community college. Most of my students, children of poor, uneducated, non-English-speaking immigrants, struggled with basic elements of survival. Some, commuted nearly two hours each way to class. For a few, graduates of the foster-care system, being a college student was as foreign as being raised in a nuclear family. They couldn't relate. While teaching english composition, I introduced them to authors such as Andrew McBride, Mary Karr, and Antwon Fisher, writers who'd emerged from poverty and struggle with confidence, purpose, and vision.
My students stumbled, failed, repeated, and either passed my class or dropped out. Years later, I bumped into one student whose aunt had thanked Jesus for the teacher who had turned her niece into a reader.
Like my father, I gave those in need respect, validation and affection. Unlike him, I learned to separate myself from the bitterness and anger that ultimately gave him a lifetime cause. I used my hurt to drive on. My struggles became personal challenges to achieve more. Fifteen years later, I still feel my father's voice, especially in the classroom. Though he cared for the poor who relied on him, I prefer to teach my students skills "to fish," so one day they can feed themselves.
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Merle can be reached at: mhuerta(at)sunyrockland(dot)edu.
A new Literary Reflections writing prompt is published the first weekend of every month. Responses are accepted until the 15th, and I promise to comment shortly after that. Look for it - we'd love to hear from you.
Do you keep a journal - or wish you could get one started? Literary Mama wants to help.
Three times a month, I'll post a writing prompt. Open a notebook and write for 10 minutes. Don't worry about grammar or punctuation - just write. Then let the writing simmer and your mind wander for awhile.
And who knows? Maybe you'll discover a character for your next short story or a theme for a narrative essay. Or maybe you'll use the idea to create a special holiday card or photo album for someone in your family. However you decide to use your journal entry, I know you'll enjoy re-reading it months--and years--down the road.
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A friend shared this two-part conversation she had with her two elementary school-aged children. Have you had a similar conversation?
Part I
Daughter: Do you know what the bad thing is?
Mom: What?
Daughter: The bad thing. Doing it.
Mom: Doing what?
Daughter: Sex.
Mom: What's sex?
Son: It's when a man has his penis in a woman's vagina. I looked it up in a World Book.
Mom: Really?
Son: Well, I didn't really look it up. I was looking up "sailboat" and I flipped the page and it was there.
Part II, a day later
Daughter: You have to have sex to have a baby, right?
Mom: Yeah, pretty much.
Son: I thought you just had to love each other a whole lot.
[pause]
Did you have sex when you had me?
Mom: Yes.
Both in unison: EWWW!
Daughter: And me?
Mom: Yes.
Both: EWWW!
Son: But not XXX (name of little sister).
Mom: Yes.
Son: EWWW! You had sex when you were old?!
The American Academy of Pediatricians says teaching children about sexuality is one of our most important parenting responsibilities:
If you relinquish that role, your child will still learn about sex, but from other children, television, popular songs, magazines, and other sources. Much of this information will be inaccurate.
Journal Entry: Write about a conversation you had with your child about sexuality. Who initiated, and what prompted, the discussion? Were your ready for it? What surprised you most about the exchange?
For more information about children and sexuality, check out the AAP's Healthy Children website: Preschoolers, Grade School, Teens.
From their press release:
Black Balloon Publishing puts out genre-bending books that rebel against industry convention: the weird, the unwieldy, the unclassifiable -- in anything from classic paperback, to interactive e-book, to digital storytelling collage.
At only two books a year, we take on what we love -- and it's a deep-seated, hippocampal love -- each title receives a personal publicist, a targeted marketing plan, promotional trailers and videos, a groundbreaking interactive app, and one helluva dedicated editor. Black Balloon books are not dropped, remaindered, or ignored. They are revered.
OUR BOOKS MARRY OLD SCHOOL WITH HIGH TECH
We like Book as object -- the smell of pulp, the sound of pages turning, the heft of a binding in hand -- and as electronic thing -- back-lit and scrollable. But why stop there? Let's animate it -- add some clickable PET scans and stop-motion video. Visualizations are insights, right-brain entries into left-brain text. Think sexual urgency maps. Topographical models of contagious diseases. Flow charts of self-flagellating monastics. The path of a cheeseburger through a digestive tract. The teachable moments are endless, and all lead back to text.
We take delight very seriously. Just break the rules, and make us believe.
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Read about the company's debut title--The Recipe Project--and more details about their publishing philosophy here.
Do you keep a journal - or wish you could get one started? Literary Mama wants to help.
Three times a month, I'll post a writing prompt. Open a notebook and write for 10 minutes. Don't worry about grammar or punctuation - just write. Then let the writing simmer and your mind wander for awhile.
And who knows? Maybe you'll discover a character for your next short story or a theme for a narrative essay. Or maybe you'll use the idea to create a special holiday card or photo album for someone in your family. However you decide to use your journal entry, I know you'll enjoy re-reading it months--and years--down the road.
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A 1997 survey conducted by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute revealed that nearly six of every 10 Americans have had a personal experience with adoption. That means they, a family member, or a close friend were adopted, adopted a child, or placed a child for adoption.
Yet, even with this majority, myths about adoption abound. Have you heard these comments?
~ Adopted children are troublemakers.
~ All adoptees have traumatic birth histories.
~ All adoptees search.
~ Birth parents can show up any time to claim their child.
~ Open adoptions cause problems for children.
~ It takes years to complete an adoption.
~ Adoption is outrageously expensive.
All are incorrect.
Suz Bednarz, a mother who surrendered her child to a closed adoption in 1986, writes this in response to the misconception that birth parents can show up any time to claim their child:
An adoptive parent expressing fear that a natural mother or father may return to take their child back is expressing fear while simultaneously showing their ignorance of the adoption relinquishment process, why it happens, and what it does to surrendering parents. The ignorance is likely rooted in a lack of understanding of what prompted their adopted child's natural parent to surrender to adoption.The adoptive parent may be correct in assuming that they natural mother or father may regret the adoption and want their child back but they are incorrect in assuming we live in a culture that would make it happen simply because the natural parent desires it.
Suz Bednarz speaks at adoption industry events on the need for adoption reform and family preservation. She can be reached at bluestokking(at)gmail(dot)com or via her adoption-themed blog.
Journal Entry: Respond to one of the statements listed above. Describe an experience you've had or one you've witnessed that disputes the statement.