This week, I heard about this new board game this week “called Starting Lines… a starting line is selected…. Every player has two minutes to change that line into a drawing with a caption — a curly-que becomes the snout of a dog, two parallel lines become the shape of a truck, circles become hot air balloons.… creators Adam and Meghan Owenz…created the game to be more than just a laugh. It's actually good for your kids' brains. And yours, too.”
"Creativity is a muscle," said Adam, a marketing professor at Albright College. "Grow your own and give your kids a chance to flex theirs and maybe we'll start to see an increase in creativity." Read more.
I was reminded of the program I did at Bridgewater Library last year where we did something very similar (without the formal board game) Picture This: Keith Haring: Characters at Play and it is something you can easily replicate at home.
If you want to explore other ways to encourage creativity in your children, check out more ideas at https://carolsimonlevin.blogspot.com/search/label/Creativity.
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Creativity will be celebrated this Saturday in West Orange at this free event
The Valley Goes Eco—Free Community Event
The Valley Goes Eco: Upcycle, Recycle, and Go Green!
FREE Classes and Performances | All Ages Welcome!
WHEN: Saturday, Sept. 8 | 2-5pm
WHERE: Luna Stage, 555 Valley Road, West Orange
Improvisational Theatre Workshops 2:30-4:30pm
Workshops for all ages, led by our local Luna Stage teaching artists. These 20-minute sessions will allow you to hone your skills in improv (the art of making something from nothing!), and have a blast as well!
Performances by Tiny Box Theater 2-5pm
Tiny Box Theater is an innovative company that makes plays inside of small re-purposed boxes. The Curiosity Shop takes place in a 1890s Victorian cash register till and Seed Money is staged in a 1950s budget box. The pieces can be viewed by one or two people at a time for a few minutes each, and invite audiences to get close, listen carefully, and find themselves in part of the piece.
LunaLit Storytime 3pm and 4pm
Luna actors read the picture book edition of The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind, a true story of human inventiveness and its power to overcome adversity. With old science textbooks, scrap metal, bicycle and tractor parts, William embarks on a plan to build a windmill in Malawi.
Art Workshops Hosted by The West Orange Arts Center
- Re-purposed Fashion Designs with Arshad Aziz
- Mosaic Art from China Shards Mosaic
- Bottle Art with the West Orange Garden Club & Our Green West Orange
Watch The Ocean Cleanup Live Launch
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Or you can spend the day at a ecology rally & festival in Morristown:
Find the event on FB at https://www.facebook.com/events/2069700243348283/ and register you and your friends on Eventbrite at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rise-for-climate-jobs-and-justice-tickets-49346490682.
Thanks to Ruth Ross at njartsmaven.com for these events. That is one of the many websites linked on the “Useful Links for Families” you can access on the right side of my blog at http://bwlibys.blogspot.com/
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Join me on September 15th as I tell stories at The NJ Storytelling Festival
details at: http://www.njstorynet.org/about-festival/
(My set will be on from 1:15-1:45)
Adults may also be interested in the morning workshop:
Saturday, September 15, 2018 9:30 to 11:30 AM Visitors Center/The Barn
Think you don’t have any personal stories worth telling? You’d be surprised. In her interactive workshop, “It’s Your Story—Tell It!” master storyteller Rona Leventhal will show you how to begin the process of taking a memory or anecdote and turning it into a story fit for an audience.
In pairs and individually, Rona will guide you through lively writing and speaking exercises that will add details, imagery, and interest to your tale. For educators, these techniques can be modified for any grade level to motivate and encourage students to believe in their ability to create their own stories too.
Looking ahead: This fall, you can also take your kids to an exhibit at the National Museum of American Jewish Culture in Philadelphia on one of the great creative people – Rube Goldberg
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Another way to encourage creativity is to visit artists’ studios and get to talk with the artists. Take your kids and go on an art tour of Somerset County:
https://www.artseenj.org/artsee-new-jersey-artist-studio-tour/
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Do you or your kids want to learn art techniques from practicing artists? Farmstead Arts in Basking Ridge is registering for fall classes.
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Or encourage an appreciation of music? Last week was the 100th Anniversary of the great musician’s birth: a tribute to Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts
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Is your child fascinated by snakes, magic, anime, robotics, model airplanes, bee keeping, jumping rope, cooking, art, astronomy or just about anything else? Somerset County 4-H probably has a club for them!
See all the opportunities here. http://www.somersetcounty4h.org
You can also support the 4-H (and/or clean out your basement) at their annual rummage sale – donations start Sunday Sept. 9th:
Walking through the woods alone can be a scary prospect for a kid, but not for 7-year-old Matthew of Portland, Oregon. He doesn't have much of a backyard at his condo, so the woods behind his house essentially serve the same purpose. He spends hours out there: swinging on a tire swing, tromping across the ravine to a friend's house, and using garden shears to cut a path. He lays down sticks to form a bridge across the small stream that flows in the winter.
And he does all of this without any adult supervision.
Matthew's mom, Laura Randall, wants her son to gain the sort of skills and confidence that only come with doing things yourself. But she didn't just toss her 7-year-old out the door with some hiking boots and garden shears one day. They worked up to it gradually with what Randall calls "experiments in independence." Read More.
More ideas on successfully turning kids into grownups can be found in this series of Ted Talks: https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/600090006/turning-kids-into-grown-ups.
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The Bridgewater Raritan Education Foundation supports our kids and you can support the foundation at their fundraising dinner October 15th. All funds raised go to support grants for local educators and scholarships for district students. Tickets are available here.
More good ideas for the new school year: https://www.nytimes.com/guides/smarterliving/family-technology
One more date to save:
Visit 30 significant historic sites, all open to the public, free of charge. All participating sites are open on Saturday, October 13 from 10 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday, October 14 from Noon to 4:00 p.m.
Explore Somerset County’s quaint villages, rolling farmsteads, lively towns and unspoiled natural areas. Participating historic sites will be grouped into three convenient tours by location: Northern, Central, and Southern Somerset County.
Learn about former Somerset County residents, some of whom were distinguished statesmen and national leaders.
Witness what life was like 50... 100... or even 200 years ago, from daily work responsibilities and pleasant pastimes to the difficult hardships endured during the American Revolution.
Discover our many and varied individual Revolutionary War histories—major contributions to the County’s designation as a Crossroads of the American Revolution State Heritage Area.
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Speaking of Fall – enjoy this list of September Read-Alouds from one of my favorite book sites: https://www.whatdowedoallday.com
https://www.whatdowedoallday.com/september-read-alouds/
And her great list of diverse books for young readers…
https://www.whatdowedoallday.com/diverse-books-2nd-3rd-grade
Want to keep up your kids math skills as well – visit
http://bedtimemath.org/category/daily-math/ for an interesting daily math problem.
Labor Day may mean the end of summer break, but we can keep eating ice cream -- and those ice cream trucks can keep rolling. Our friend Lisa B. asked, how many ice cream bars and popsicles does a truck sell in a day? Well, it depends where the truck goes. From our own experience, at a park a truck can unload 20-30 bars to one crowd. If the truck finds 10 good places like that, it can sell 200 to 300 bars that day. Remember, around 100 years ago we didn't even have ice cream trucks. But in 1913 the electric freezer was invented, and in 1920 Harry Burt figured out how to coat ice cream in hardened dark chocolate. Suddenly people could sell ice cream from trucks. The driver pays less for the ice cream than he/she sells it for, so that's how the driver makes money - and that's where the math comes in.
Wee ones: Lots of ice cream bars look like rectangles. How many sides does a rectangle have? Is the floor of your room a rectangle?
Little kids: If a driver sells 4 ice cream sandwiches and 2 popsicles, how many ice cream treats is that? Bonus: If he sells an orange popsicle, then a lemon, then a cherry, then orange, lemon, cherry...what flavor is the 11th popsicle?
Big kids: If they keep selling orange, lemon, cherry, then orange to repeat, what flavor is the 25thpopsicle? See if you can get it without counting up! Bonus: If the truck sells twice as many treats at the second stop as at the first, and sells 60 total, how many did it sell at each stop?
The sky's the limit: If the driver buys each treat for $1, which way will make more money, selling 20 of them for $5 each or 30 of them for $4 each?
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How To Inspire Kids To Change the World by Katarina Wallentin
(from: https://www.alsc.ala.org/blog/2018/09/inspire-kids-to-change-the-world)
Who are the people that truly change the world?
For me it is the people who dare to think bigger, bolder, beyond and definitively different. The text in the famous Apple ad actually puts it rather well…
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”― Rob Siltanen
So how can we, as adults, inspire and encourage the uniqueness and difference in the kids that may change the world?
Let me use my nephew as an example. He is 8 years old, absolutely brilliant, incredibly funny and what many would call…slightly crazy.
From his very early years, he has been exploring the world with an unsatisfiable appetite. He put matches in the toaster to see if it will explode, he drilled a little hole in his stomach when he was checking if the drill could be used as a massage stick and one day he decided to hitch-hike all the way home from school since his legs got very tired of biking.
I absolutely adore this child, and he continues to amaze me. In addition to his explorative nature, he is kind and caring and an incredibly smart kid. It is a joy to try to keep up with his ideas and I must admit, I am often many, many steps behind him.
My nephew is a dragon child. I know he will change the world – somehow.
And whenever I meet a dragon child, I try to empower her or him to:
#1 Trust their knowing
Kids know. They are like big radio receivers, picking up everything around them, the spoken and unspoken. And their perception is not yet filtered by all the projections, expectations, separations and judgements that most adults see the world. That means that they are often more right on than we are…
One of the greatest gifts you can give kids (and yourself) is ask them questions and trust their point of view and suggestions for what is going on, and what is required.
#2 Keep coloring outside the lines
We often try to show kids the right way of doing things – for example how to carefully color inside the lines in a coloring book. But really, that is just the way it has been done up till that moment! What if we instead get excited by all the different ways a task could be accomplished?
What if the wackiest ways of coloring, is the very beginning of a whole new way of painting, never before seen on this Earth?
#3 Stay weird
It can get very lonely being different. Sometimes it may seem easier to just shut that unique part off and fit in with everyone else. The choice to stay weird is a brave one. It takes immense courage. It can help to hear that now and then – to know that someone has your back.
This world of ours is not yet the best of all possible worlds. Our children have the capacity to change it into something greater. Our job is to inspire them to know that they can!
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Katarina Wallentin is an avid explorer of the magic that is truly possible on this beautiful planet of ours. For over 10 years, she worked with communication and leadership in international organizations such as United Nations, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children — continuously seeking for something greater and different for and in the world. Now an Access Consciousness facilitator, she has written two books for empowering children: The Baby Unicorn Manifesto and Clara & The Climate Changer. Coming soon: The Baby Dragon Manifesto!
Do one thing every day that scares you ! – Eleanor Roosevelt
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Reblogging from ALSC (Association for Library Service to Children) 
The Art of Turning Pages: Illustrations by Lulu Delacre for Sonia Sotomayor’s Life Story
