The Squiggle by Carole Lexa Schaefer
Author as Mentor-6 trait lesson on Ideas
Ideas – The concept focus is Ideas as a squiggle. Ideas can come from anywhere and you can, in turn, write about anything. The squiggle allows us to challenge our minds for ideas. Standards Addressed: • With assistance, use prewriting strategies to plan written work; • With assistance, draw or write sentences that address a single topic. About the Story: This call to creativity shows that rope need not serve a purely functional purpose. Walking with her classmates on a trip to the park, a dark-haired girl finds a flexible length of red cord and begins to shape it into outlines on the sidewalk. Her designs have a Chinese theme: she creates a festival dragon's curving spine, a tightrope for an acrobat who carries a bamboo umbrella, and the angular edge of the Great Wall. She then shows her inventions to her classmates, who had been moving ""in a bunched-up, slow, tight, straight line""; when they take hold of the rope, their procession loosens into a ""squiggle."" Schaefer (In the Children's Garden) adds an aural dimension to the girl's visual game, imagining ""Crack crickle hiss-the sky trail of popping fireworks"" and ""Ripple shhh-the circle of a deep still pool."" Morgan (The Nine Days Wonder) illustrates with calligraphic strokes of marker and gouache on speckly, paper-bag-brown stock. With a few deliberate lines, minimal color and plenty of negative space, he suggests the blank openness onto which the girl projects her ideas. Together, Schaefer and Morgan encourage readers to see that mundane objects hold playful possibilities. Ages 3-7. The Lesson: Used as a center activity to teach students about IDEA Materials: Pre-bound books some with squiggles already on them and some without. Those students without are to make their own squiggles. Anticipatory set: Read the story with students. Use Smartboard Technology and Notebook Software to create a squiggle to provide a model for students. Step 1: Together discuss what creative things the little girl made her string into. Step 2: Students are to use crayons, markers, and or color pencils, anything to help them make their squiggle into a picture. Step 3: Using lines underneath their picture, students are to write a story or explanation to go with the squiggle. Step 4: Students share their stories with their classmates. Extension: Place a paint glob in the center of a folded piece of paper. Have students fold the paper so the paint spreads out. Have students talk about what they see in the paint glob. Have students use their ideas to write a story with a friend. Other Works: The    Piece |
About the Author:
Carole Lexa Schaefer is an award winning children's book author. She has over twenty picture books and easy readers published with four major publishing companies, and several more titles under contract for publication.
As an educator, as well as an author, Carole is comfortable and experienced in giving presentations of her books and related topics to both children and adults. In addition to many classroom visits, she has presented to the American Library Association, the Association of American English Teachers, the Conference of Whole Language Teachers, and the International Reading Association.
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