Friday, February 13, 2009

Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam or Not All Children's Websites Have the Conjones To Publish Cutting Edge Stories That Include Spam

First and foremost, please have a look here to see some even better photos of Lucy's dollhouse. Vita brought a light with her this week and took some wonderful pictures. Hey, this lady is serious about her love of dollhouses!

She also inspired Lucy to start writing up little character sketches of all the people who inhabit the dollhouse, for which I am ever grateful. It is a rare and beautiful thing when the kids decide to take up a writing project. In our unschooled world, such projects rarely come down from on high. Rather they start in the wild unknown of Finn and Lucy's brains. The results are often spectacular and far beyond anything I could dream up if I were making assignments. One of my all-time favourite lines from a recent Lucy story is "Joel was the kind of person who went around asking for dynamite and then never used it." Donald Barthelme you may have a successor!

Lucy submitted her story to a website that was soliciting stories written by children The story was titled "The Expedition" and involved a group of people who traveled from St. John's, Newfoundland, to Sig (an imaginary place) to do educational research - it included lots of Spam (the meat product not the email product) and general confusion. She never heard back from them! I was a bit miffed since they were still sending out emails calling for stories but then I looked at the site. All the stories were about happy butterflies and little girls who pick flowers, etc.. Joel and his dynamite had no place there. You gotta know your venue, kid! Sage advice every parent should hand down to their children.

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