Back Room Kids-Meeting October 27, 2011.

The meeting was SPOOKTACULAR! Started off by decorating ghost and pumpkin cookies and gathering in book reviews (stay tuned for those). There was gnashing and gnawing as the decortating carried one with every making use of the brains, eyeballs, fingers and skulls provided to make the cookied truly horrific. Can you say...zombies in the house? I had no idea.

That took up most of the meeting and we had just a bit of time left to build our spooky story.

Started off the story with some inspiration from Alvin Schwartz’s book SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK. It has a really short ghost story that goes something like this:

One night a girl was taking a short cut through the cemetery. She caught up with another girl and said, “Can I walk with you? Graveyards scare me.” “Of course!” replied the other girl. “They use to scare me, too, when I was alive.”

(Eek! In the ten minutes we had left for the meeting we decided to carry it on from there with every one sharing possible directions to send the story in. This is what we came up with and remember this is a first draft, some kids have taken this home and are working on revising! )

The girl asked “What do you mean you’re not alive?” Then she screamed so hard she died.


Actually people just thought she had died, but had just fainted.


When she woke up and found herself in a coffin underground.


The first thing she saw in the coffin was the other girl and who said, “I’m sorry.”


Banging on the coffin door the girl tried to make it budge, no luck it wasn’t going to open.


She thinks, after failing to open the coffin door, wait it’s underground how can I breathe? Gasping for air, the girl was slowly losing time.


She could hear chanting from above, she thought it was the girl from the graveyard. She slipped off into the darkness. She had officially died. She was officially a ghost.


She awoke, her white snowy eyes opened and she lifted out from the coffin. It was 500 years into the future. By then the girl was very old and frail…and dead. A ghost, walking in the graveyard…waiting for the next girl to come along.

Stay tuned for further revisions and illustrations from some of the talented artists in the group!

Next week we the entire meeting will be all about writing, illustrating and sharing. We will be featuring the book SPILLING INK.

In the meantime we invite you to check out the Spilling Ink blog...it is inspiring, fun and filled with great ideas for young writers.

And finally, I ran out of time to let the kids know that our book club discussion book for December (want to give everyone enough time to read and re-read in some cases) will be SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS, The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket.  

It was one of the top two choices of all the kids present at the initial meeting and discussion. We are ordering extra copies. Looking forward to lively meeting of talk and activities related to the book. Will also include a book to movie discussion related to this particular series.