Visit from author Holly Payne!

Author Holly Payne visited the Youth Intervention Center on June 3rd to discuss the release of her latest book Kingdom of Simplicity on June 6th. As a former local of Lancaster County, she discussed her inspiration and the events in her life that led to this Amish story of forgiveness.

The bookmobile now has two copies of this fascinating novel and two more copies have been added to the Youth Intervention Center's library!

During the program, Holly shared a letter with the residents from a tragic past experience. She added that the letter and the writing of this novel led to her understanding of forgiveness. After passing around paper and pencils, the residents wrote adventure letters to their role models, and many of them shared! It was a very exciting program and the residents had many excited questions for the author. The evening ended, of course, with several autographs! :)

Thank you, Holly, for a fantastic visit!

Issue 2

It's now available online! I hope you enjoy it! We want to thank all the residents that participated. It was a fantastic issue and we had a lot of fun putting it together!

Everyone! Please feel free to tell us what you think!

Issue 2 5-6-09

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Other Creative Writing magazine programs

Issue 2 & The Printz Award Program

Tonight we release Issue 2 of What's Up? Magazine!!!!!!!! We are really excited to see what everyone thinks. Check back to the blog here soon for a digital PDF copy!

Our new program this evening is called Excellence & Awards. The residents will learn about The Michael L. Printz Award in recognition of Children's Book Week. They will decorate character potatoes to be entered into the annual Potato Awards! This program will help everyone to start considering what skills and traits go into excellence. They will listen to a read aloud of Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta, the 2009 winner of the Printz award!

Kids as writers + submission deadline!

Hello folks. Tonight we are traveling to the YIC for the Kids as Writers program. We will make modpodged journals and participate in a creative writing activity. The residents will learn about publishing, hear a Teen Ink read aloud, and submit writings for the next issue of What's Up? magazine!

And that's right, today is the deadline for submissions! We can't wait to put Issue 2 together. It will be released on May 6, 2009 both in print and here on the blog. Be sure to check back.

Origami

Hello again!

We're bringing back an older program that we used when we first started visiting the YIC! It's a fun program filled with hands-on activities. At the start of this program, the teens will need to learn to work together in order to complete a group juggling ice breaker.

Some read alouds like One Red Dot by David A. Carter will show the residents the many amazing objects and designs, even 3-D ones, that can be made with paper! This book is too cool, see what's inside here.


After the read alouds, we're passing out origami "how to" books, pulling up chairs, and helping each other figure out how to make animals, water balloons, hearts, and many other fascinating objects from a single square sheet of paper! Residents will learn a bit about this Japenese art form and will listen to authentic Japanese music while folding.