I told my son to turn off the television for a while this afternoon. He started his “break” by playing the piano for a while, but it wasn’t long before he became bored.
“What should I do?”
“How about your art journal?”
A few minutes later, he returns, showing me the prompt: hide a secret message somewhere in this book.
“Can you find it?”
I thumb through the entire journal (backward) until finally landing on the title page. In very small print, in green ink, on top of his very first assignment in the journal (Write your name using large letters), he had written I_Am_Not.
“Cool,” I remarked.
“Do you get it? It’s my name: I_Am_Not.” [Ian]
So, for fun, I sat down and wrote my own version of “If you can read this…” The first attempt was pretty poor, but Ian liked the idea.
“Well, Mom, the secret message part is cool, but the sentences are too silly.”
Ok, I can do better than that. So I labored for a while, and this is the end result. I hope you like it:
I’m frightened. You opened up, crying all night: “Remember everyone always dies.” Then had I stood, yelling “onward” until…after remembering eternity, stopped mourning and returned tearfully.
I really had a lot of fun writing this, so here’s my writing prompt for you all: Take your favorite quote, scripture, or phrase, and write a story using each letter of the phrase as the first letter of each word in your story. I think it would be particularly entertaining to combine dissimilar elements with this prompt. For example, try hiding a secret message about murder inside the description of a fairy-land. Or better yet, hide a message about your best friend’s betrayal inside a story about how you became friends in the first place.
photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/17261684@N00/6104388950″>I hope all the trouble with vinyl will be worth it! In progress</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Full Circle Homeschooling 