Another Nerdy Saturday Night and Summer Camps

Victor and Emery are playing Lord of the Rings Monopoly while watching The Hobbit, part 2.

I think the only thing to top that would be if we were reading another Shakespeare play out loud.

So, have you signed up for your summer camps yet? If not, you’re probably too late to get into the more popular ones. Like the Percy Jackson one held in Austin, TX each year--registration begins in November. 

As you know from a post I did last year, we sign up for camps early each year. We’ve had a lot of success and failures (I’ve lost many dollars on camps Emery left early). We’re only doing two camps this year, both theatre camps, because we’re taking a very exciting trip. More on that later, but just a few additions to my choosing summer camps rules:

1.    Don’t regret missing a camp because you’ve scheduled a big trip. It’s going to be okay if your kid can’t star in the local kids' version of Peter Pan.

2.    By all means, get your kid’s opinion but you have the final word. Research, find out information from others who have attended the camp before and make an informed decision. 

3.    Don’t put a kid in a camp with a friend just so he can be with that friend. It’s not fair for anybody to make sacrifices with money or time, just so they can be together—there are always times outside of camps.

4.    I can’t comment on overnight camps, but if your kid says he doesn’t want to go, don’t make him. Even if it’s the super awesome sounding Stagedoor Manor (I just read Theater Geeks, written by the same guy, Mickey Rapkin, who wrote the book Pitch Perfect was based on which is about a theater camp).

5.    An educational camp is still education, even if it’s a camp that uses science to teach Minecraft. School is school.

Now that camps are signed up for, it’s time to think about the summer project for Emery. Two years ago, it was the Medieval Times, last year Shakespeare, I suppose this year it needs to be something science-related.

I always liked physics. 

Don’t read this if your kid plays video games and you want him to stop

An updated version of the video game walkthrough--the wiki page.  Thank you contributors. 

A student in my class referred to Seymour Papert’s 1993 book The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer this week. Not familiar with his work, I turned to trusty Amazon to read the first few pages. In doing so, I came across this statement found in the preface:

         "The love affair [he had been discussing how parents sometimes view their children as being addicted to computers and video games] involves more than the desire to do things with computers. It also has an element of possessiveness and, most importantly, of assertion of intellectual identity.”

I could just see Emery using this statement on me someday. He might stop letting me play his Nintendo. But, taken another way, imagine what our children can and do teach us about their technological worlds—see Emery’s “Let’s Plays” post.

My students are always quick to point out the dangers of the computer (cyberbullying, false, misleading information, and they point out that many of their students don’t have access to them).

But this post is really about something else—I played video games before Emery did. Some of my fondest memories were of my family playing Atari games together (my parents had fierce battles playing what I think was called Megalomania). I, like many of my contemporaries, grew up with Nintendo’s Mario and Zelda. And, then I stopped playing for many years.

The next time I picked up a console happened shortly after Emery’s birth. Well, before that Victor and I played some PC games, one of our favorites was an Alice in Wonderland adventure. Victor and I can’t remember if someone gave us one, or if we bought it, but for the next several years, we played game after game (he always watching, and yelling at me what to do—although he did get me through a sticky spot in Zelda: Orcania of Time).

I say this because I’ve gone back to one of my favorite games—Oblivion, and frankly, I don’t want to share it with Emery. Not yet.  

EMERY'S COMMENT: i'm back and i love it. mom has started playing video games again like pikmin 3 and more LEGEND Of ZELDA with help from me. i guess i owed her for when i would ask for help when i was young. She will soon finish the legend of zelda: A Link between Worlds and she will play other games with me more.

Fanfiction and book #15 Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl

The first three volumes of Emery's Pokemon Fanfic

This week my popular culture and pedagogy course is studying identity and fanfiction/ fanfic. Part of our lesson was to (no surprise here) read and watch some fanfic. Here is a link to one of those videos, Buffy vs. Edward—Twilight Remixed. 

I love Buffy and have written on the show several times, even a book chapter called Buffy vs. Bella, but that’s for another post. After watching this clip, I visited fanfiction.net and tried to find some fanfic from the Buffyverse in which Anya lives. I can’t say I found anything satisfactory but the Buffy fanfic was better than the Minecraft fanfic that I read through in the hopes of finding something for Emery.

It seems as if Minecraft has its own fanfic books—Emery asked to get a copy of a one that I hope he’ll review in a later post. Which made me realize he’s been a reader and writer of fanfic for a long time. I think it started after he watched the movie Bolt. He came home and started drawing Captain Underpants-type work with Bolt. (if you didn’t see Bolt, it’s the Disney movie about the hamster). Then, he found out about Pokemon fanfic from flipnotes (flipnotes are animated short films created on a Nintendo DS). I had to then print out and read an epic-length story on a post-apocalyptic Pokemon world, which wasn’t bad.

Which leads me to Rowell’s Fangirl. Freshman Cath and her twin Wren, are college freshmen. Once there, they part ways as each becomes involved with her own group of friends and acquaintances. Cath has an ability for writing and enrolls in a upper level creative writing classroom. She is also a very popular fanfic writer and has thoughsands of readers who follow her sotry of Simon Snow, a Harry Potter like character, who falls in love with his school rival, Baz. Cath soon learns that her creative writing professor has no admiration for fanfic, and Cath becomes unable to find her own voice, her own content for writing. Through in a couple of supportive friends, a hunky guy or two, and a parent who needs help, and you have a pretty good story.

It’s unlike Eleanor & Park in several ways—it’s less dark, less risqué, and much longer. But still a quick read. My graduate student saw the cover and immediately recognized the artwork from Noelle Stevenson (you can check out her tumblr here). 

Now, back to teaching. In both my class and in Fangirl, the idea of whether this type of writing deserves a place is writing is brought up. I tend to take a similar stance to fanfic as I do to writing. If a kid’s motivated to write, then what’s the harm in that?

On a completely unrelated topic, did you child have a week of standardized testing? We did in Louisiana. 

Tech-free Tuesday Fun during National Poetry Month

Emery making his book spine poem--He even worked in the dictionary!

The several weeks right before the graduate school deadline for exams is always a busy time. In the past week and the one coming up, I have to read 2 dissertations, 1 thesis, and 13 action research projects. And, in addition to that, I’ve been conducting observations in two different classrooms each day. And, of course, that’s in addition to my usual teaching and grading and meetings. I need to plan better for next year.

Both teachers I’m observing are doing poetry units. It is no coincidence that April is National Poetry Month. I’ve never been good as uncovering a poem’s meaning, but I love a good poem. I’m not a poet either, but one of the teachers did something neat with her students that I thought would make a good tech-free Tuesday activity.

It’s called book spine poetry. To get good instructions and examples for kids, check out this site. But it’s rather easy to get. Grab a stack of books and arrange the titles into something that reads like a poem. Here’s the one I did:

Of course, there are limitations. If you don’t have many books or are a digital book reader, you might have to print out a bunch of titles on little slips of paper and arrange them or go to your local library or book store.

Ready to create your own book spine poetry? Consider sending it to Travis Jonker at the School Library Journal. He's posting them. Have fun.