Fun and Games

By Cara Lopez Lee

On the first day of my recent Lighthouse Young Writers workshop, Moments of Make-Believe, Ruby silently cried for half the class. It was not easy to figure out what this third-grader’s problem was.

The other eight elementary school kids jumped right in when I paired them up to introduce themselves and share one of the weirdest things they ever did. Ruby was silent. When I asked if she had shared yet, Hannah said, “She’s still thinking.”

Ruby's RabbitThen I gave them a writing prompt: “A fictional character does the weird thing your partner did with even weirder results.” Ruby wouldn’t write. When I tried to help, the tears began to fall. I asked if she understood the instructions, told her she did not have to follow the prompt, asked if she needed help, asked “What’s wrong?”

She gave monosyllabic answers, shook her head, and cried harder, until it dawned on me. “Ruby…do you speak English?”

“No.”

Grace called across the room, “She only moved here from China one month ago.”

Nobody had told me.

While the other kids wrote paragraphs, I helped Ruby spell three-letter words to construct one sentence.

When we circled up to share, Ruby was still crying. I explained to everyone, “In stories, we imagine what it would be like to be someone else. Imagine what it would be like to go to a school in another country where they speak another language, and to not understand anything anybody was saying. That’s what’s happening to Ruby.”

“Wow,” Nicholas said. “That would be awful.”

Indeed.

“So while we work on writing stories, Ruby will also work on her English,” I said.

She read her first sentence, tears streaming down her face, while Maggie rubbed her back. When Ruby finished reading we all cheered. Nobody made fun of her as I had feared.

In 2013, Scientific American published psychological research from the New School in New York City showing that reading literary fiction improves empathy. I choose to extrapolate that writing fiction has a similar effect. The elementary school kids I work with may not be creating classic literature—yet—but they do strive to tell good stories. In so doing, they’re not only building creativity, but also building character.

Ruby’s personal story became part of our class. The next week she surprised me—by coming back. She was cheerful for the rest of our time together.

When did she start smiling? It was at the end of our first day, when we played a game, one that I never should have picked: Concentration, which requires rhythmic hand-clapping and finger-snapping while thinking up words and chanting them on the spot. Most of the kids could not snap their fingers, or think of words while clapping. The results were ridiculous. We couldn’t stop laughing. Nobody could do it. Ruby was delighted, and so was everyone else.

I was one of the instructors from the Lighthouse Young Writers program who recently took part in classroom management training with a pair of teaching artists from the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. I immediately put some of their techniques to work, but it was their attitudes more than anything that infected me. During the training, we kept moving around and playing games. Although I had long included playful activities in my workshops, I had so much fun at the training that I decided, “That’s it. I’m doing more.”

But how? These are writing classes, which require a lot of applying butt to chair. By the time we’re done discussing concepts, reading examples, writing exercises, answering questions, and creating stories, there’s almost no time. Where was I going to carve out more?

I’ll confess, I let go of some reading time—not all, but enough that I felt I was out on a limb.

The results in Ruby’s class surprised me: their written stories were better developed than I’d yet seen in this age group. The surveys they filled out were more enthusiastic than ever, and much clearer about what they had learned.

What was going on?

Every game we played, including Concentration, built on the concepts of scene development and character development. The children pantomimed scenes, played a freeze-tag game in which they struck poses to demonstrate sensory images, played word games involving obstacles and character flaws, folded construction paper into fans and then wrote inside the fans to literally expand their scenes, and drew comic strips of their story climaxes.

It was harder to control the class, the opposite of what I intended, but I didn’t care. The class was engaged, so I was not stressed. They were goofing off, laughing, and talking more—but they were also completing more pages than I was used to seeing. Gwen Dewar, founder of Parenting Science, offers possible reasons for this in her article "The Cognitive Benefits of Play," including multiple studies that reveal a link between play and the development of language and social skills.

I’m reminded that writing itself, even about serious subjects, is an act of play. By playing with words, ideas, and experiences on the page, we understand ourselves and others in a new way. Play is essential to creativity, to inspiration, to joy. How can any human endeavor succeed without it?

 
Ruby almost cried again on our last day, but only because she thought I was taking her finished story away. It’s the story of a rabbit that must find carrots to save her friends from starving. Ruby wrote most of the story at home, so I’m not sure how much help she had, but she was able to read it and draw pictures showing that she understood it. Once I made clear that I was only keeping the story to publish it with all the others on the Lighthouse Young Writers blog, Ruby beamed.


Cara Lopez Lee is the author of the memoir They Only Eat Their Husbands (Conundrum Press, 2014). She has been teaching for the Lighthouse Young Writers Program for more than four years. She’ll read at the LitFest Book Fair All-Ages Storytime, Monday, June 8, 12:15 – 1:00 p.m.