Aidan has chosen to rewrite the story for children. He will create a picture book which will be 15-20 pages in length. Aidan brought home a stapled set of 8 papers for him to use for his rough draft. There are 21 segments, containing space for a sketch and lines to write the Event, Who's in the picture?, What's in the picture?, and What is written on the page?
Aidan has had this package of papers for 2 days, he had drawn two rough, small pencil sketches and answered the Who and What questions for the first segment. At this rate, he'll have hardly begun by the time the assignment is due!
It's clear that Aidan is very enthusiastic about this project and has some big ideas. He's just having difficulty getting started. He seems to get overwhelmed by his thoughts and ends up not really getting anything recorded.
I decided to try a brainstorming session with him. I pulled out three sets of coloured sticky notes and brought them to the dining room table. We began by writing out the names of all the characters. I gave Aidan his own Sharpie pen so he could write out some brainstorming ideas, but he immediately started writing one of the sentences he wanted to include in his picture book. I let him finish the sentence, then I explained that we will save that step for later. For now, we would be simply jotting down quick ideas to help us organise our thoughts.
So I resolved to do all the writing, while Aidan brainstormed ideas. I asked him to tell me about the events in the story that really made him able to see them happening in his mind. He eagerly interjected and said, "I really could, you know! It was just like I was there while everything was happening." And so, we were off and running. The first event Aidan mentioned was the fire. Eventually, we ended up with a list of 15+ events that he could use for writing his story.
We stuck each event sticky note on the wall, then proceeded to put them into order. Here they are:
1. Plane
2. See the boat for the first time
3. Lyssa got seasick
4. Storm
5. Water flooding the cabin
6. Capt. Cascadden fell overboard
7. Mr. Radford abandoned ship
8. Will cooled the engine by using a towel
9. Explosion! Fire!
10. Boat was sinking
11. Raft
12. Thought J.J. and Lyssa weren't alive
13. Luke realised his friends were unconscious
14. Dolphins
15. Island
To give him a bit of a kick start, I scribed for him and filled in the first three lines of each segment in his package. He told me what to write, and I scribbled it on his pages. When we reached #8, the event in which Will is cooling the engine, I told him I was a bit lost - I couldn't see how we got from Mr. Radford abandoning ship, to a hot engine. Aidan said, "Aaahhhh... yes, we need to add an event ... Lyssa built the engine and got it restarted." And Aidan made a final revision on #14, correcting that it was actually only one dolphin who helped the survivors who were floating on the wreckage of the Phoenix.
Aidan is hooked on this trilogy and has been reading book #2 on his own. Luckily, as we were unpacking, I had discovered an unopened trilogy that Nana had given either Austin or Iain years ago. It was a duplicate of books we already had, so remained unopened until this week. Since our other copies are waiting for us to pick them up in Seattle (Austin read this series while we were sailing in the Caribbean), I'm happy these were ready at hand when Aidan wanted to read them.
It looks like he's going to be another Gordon Korman fan, too. We'll have to dig out our collection and make a few trips to the library to keep him in books!
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