Thursday, December 8, 2011

You Might be a Writer If...

The other day when I was rooting around in the attic to find the early December box (note to self: clean out attic while it's cool enough to be up there), I came across the old magnetic marble run. We used to keep the colorful chutes, lever cups, and funnel on our refrigerator for whenever the nephews were over. Designing and redesigning runs to send marble after marble on its merry way was always good for lots of fun, but once the boys got old enough to lose interest, the set was tossed in a Target bag and lost in that black hole of storage space above our heads.

Looking at the sack of green and purple plastic, it occurred to me that I knew plenty of kids who had not had the chance to outgrow such a fun toy, and glad that they might be appreciated once more, I brought them to school.

So it was that they were scattered across the white board when the writing club met in my room this afternoon. I had not been mistaken: every kid who's had the chance to use it has loved the marble run, and the writing club members were no exception. They all wanted to arrange and rearrange the pieces to see if they could guide the marble safely to its bin. Finally, we told them that they could play with it at the end, but one clever young writer took up the dry erase marker to show us how the game was relevant to our cause,


and for the rest of the meeting, they took turns to see how many books they could publish.

No comments:

Post a Comment