Twelve Writing Prompts - One for Everyone Month

Start the new year right with Twelve Different Writing Prompts - One for Every Month by revisiting my 2024 Year of AWE - Authentic Writing Experiences below. SIGN UP for my newsletter for new resources coming all through 2025 that will be based on my HOT ROD Activity Books.

January - Explore how to turn thank-you notes into a powerful literacy experience. Find highlights in the January Blog.

February - Read about an Edgar Allan Poe Valentine Scandal and get tips for creating acrostic poems. Find highlights HERE.

March - Get ideas for using food and recipe writing to celebrate culture. Students learn how to write step-by-step directions for a practical and fun purpose. Find highlights HERE.

April - Download the FREE poetry writing PDF Activity called Pandora's Lunch Box. Learn how to write List Poems HERE.

May - Explore using summer vacation themes to research topics and create information posters HERE.

June - Create a Nature Journal and encourage students write down their observations about the natural world HERE. 

July - Stimulate the imagination of young people by exploring inventions at your local fair. If you don't have the opportunity to go to a real fair, read the book, Mr. Ferris and His Wheel. Read more HERE.

August - Read a book and write a letter to the author. Discover tips for connecting with authors and for writing multi-paragraph letters HERE.

September - Plan a day at the museum and discover tips for using photographs and captions to summarize the experience HERE.

October - In celebration of the release of my new book, The Raven Remix: A Mashup of Poe Titles, this month's Authentic Writing Experience is about Scary Stories. Find it HERE.

November -in addition to being a famous poet and short story writer, Poe was also a magazine editor and literary critic. Visit my BLOG for details about Poe's other career and to discover tips for helping students write book reviews.

December - Learn how to write song spoofs HERE by enjoying this Edgar Allan Poe inspired rendition of "Jingle Bells."

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Read My New Book for Free - And Write a Review

My new book The Raven Remix: A Mashup of Poe Titles, can be read online for FREE on Net Galley until January 2, 2025. Use this LINK to Net Galley or the QR code below. You can quickly sign up for free to be a member. Once you are a member, you can access hundreds of books at no charge, many before they are released to the public. All they ask is that you write a review.

I have received over a dozen reviews on Goodreads, but none on Amazon. If you read my book, please leave a review.

Go HERE to write a review on Amazon. 

Go HERE to write a review on Goodreads.

Here is what people are saying about The Raven Remix...

"An unusual alternative introduction to Poe..." Kirkus Reviews

"Dean transforms the darker tones of Poe into imaginative humor and mystery." Paula Moraine, Me. Ed. Author of Helping Students Take Control of Everyday Executive Functions.

"Dean has provided a simple introduction to Poe's exciting work while increasing awareness of the lifelong resilience that many students need." Cynthia Barton, LSP, MA, PA, School Psychologist

From Goodreads...

"The Raven Remix is a clever parody of "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe."

"Bringing classics into the vernacular, while still maintaining the style, structure, and concept of the original is a very clever way way to engage kids." 

"This book was such a clever way of  incorporating Edgar Allan Poe for a younger audience." 

If you would rather have a hard copy of the book for your students, it may be found at my online STORE, on AMAZON, or you may order it from your favorite local bookstore.

Sign up HERE for the Carolee Dean, Author newsletter and receive a FREE digital copy of my book, No Gift for Man. You will also receive monthly updates, book news, and FREEBIES.

Holiday Song Parodies - A Remake of "The Bells" by Poe (Jingle Bell Style)

This is my final installment for 2024 - A Year of AWE - Authentic Writing Experiences. My definition of AWE is any writing intended to be shared with more people than the classroom teacher.  This month I'm exploring Winter Song Parodies.  

Songs written to the tune of popular winter melodies can be great fun. Singing and performing them in front of classmates adds a social element that makes this activity highly interactive. If you pair a winter songwriting activity with a book review, poetry analysis, or author-inspired profile, you may get some hilarious results and some very different interpretations. 

I have had Edgar Allan Poe on my mind all year, as you may have noticed from previous posts about my book, The Raven Remix. In my Song Parody Below, I combine "Jingle Bells" with Poe's famous poem, "The Bells," and a few other Poe-inspired images for good measure. Try this with your students. 

1. Provide a variety of winter songs to choose from.

2. Choose a rhyming poem, multiple poems, or a body of work from a famous poet or author that students may use to create a parody. I use poems in the public domain, so I can be careful not to infringe on              anyone's copyright.

3. Make a list of rhyming words inspired by the work. 

4. Use words, images, and ideas from the poem to write a spoof based on the winter song.

5. Be sure to credit the original poet and acknowledge that this is a parody of their work.

"The Haunted Jingle Bells" by Carolee Dean

Inspired by "The Bells" by Edgar Allan Poe

Verse 1:

Dashing through the snow

on a sledge with silver bells

Passing ghouls, we go,

with screams and shouts and yells.

Bells on steeples ring.

Spirits roam at night.

What fun it is to listen to 

a scary tale tonight.

Chorus:

Jingling bells, Tinkling bells,

bells that clang and chime.

Oh, what fun it is to plot.

What fun it is to rhyme.

Scary birds, made-up words,

bugs that bite and sting,

treasure maps, pits and traps,

bells that ring and ring.

Verse 2

If you're looking for a tale

to give yourself a fright

If you like to stay up late

reading in the night...

Check out Ed A. Poe,

a man of mystery.

Open up a book.

This is what you'll see...

Chorus:

Jingling bells, Tinkling bells,

bells that clang and chime.

Oh, what fun it is to plot.

What fun it is to rhyme.

Scary birds, made-up words,

bugs that bite and sting,

treasure maps, pits and traps,

bells that ring and ring.

My new decodable book The Raven Remix: A Mashup of Poe Titles is now available on Ingram, Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can also order it from your favorite local bookstore.

Sign up for my newsletter HERE and receive a free copy of my first decodable book, No Gift for Man. Don't miss any of the fun-filled activities coming up in 2025.

ASHA and NCTE 2024

I'm presenting at the ASHA (American-Speech-Language-Hearing Association) Annual 2024 Conference in Seattle on Thursday, December 5, at 5:30pm.  If you are at the conference, I will be in Summit  433-434 on the fourth floor. My topic is "The Write Stuff: Creating Narrative-Based Interventions for Articulation, Decoding, Executive Functions, and More." Even if you can't come to the conference, check out my handout packet using the QR code below. The packet will give you a chance to preview the beginning of my new book, The Raven Remix: A Mashup of Poe Titles. All the activities are based on The Raven Remix Activity Book, coming in early 2025.

Last week I was in Boston for the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) conference, where I spoke on a panel with Jolene Gutierrez, Beth Anderson, and Debbie Myers on the topic of using Illustrated Narrative Non-Fiction as a bridge to traditional non-fiction. 

While I was at NCTE, I got the chance to go to dinner at a fun Italian restaurant in the Seaport with Leslie Roessing, who wrote a chapter for my book, Story Frames for Teaching Literacy: Enhancing Student Learning Through the Power of Storytelling. Use the code AF on the Brookes website for a 10% discount. Although I have known her for years, this was the first time I ever met her in person. See my interview with her about Teaching Memoir Writing to Kids. Find her books (The Write to Read and more...) on Amazon. She also has a great website, Literacy with Lesley, which lists her books, informative blog posts on a variety of topics, book reviews, and more reading and writing strategies than I could count. Lyn Miller-Lachman was also part of our dinner party. I interviewed her three years ago, talking about her book, Rogue, and her personal challenges with Asperger's Syndrome. Read that blog post HERE, check out all the new books on her Amazon page, and visit her Website. 

I also got to meet some fun new people, including Jo Watson Hackl (see her Website), author of Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe, and blogger Melissa Thom. Check out Melissa's author interviews at the Joyful Learning Podcast. 

Next year NCTE will be in Denver!! No telling who I might run into then.

Authentic Writing Experience for November - Writing Book Reviews

The November Authentic Writing Experience is all about book reviews. Creating book reviews is a great way to work on summary and essay writing, but reviews are so much more than just an old-fashioned book report. They have a real-life purpose. A book review is designed to share impressions and opinions of books with our friends and to get suggestions of books we might like from them. Many adults join book clubs to talk about books. Some prefer movies and enjoy writing reviews for films on sites like Rotten Tomatoes. They also get ideas for movies they might enjoy by reading other people's reviews.

When I worked with high school students on the autism spectrum, we had an after-school movie club. We watched movies, talked about movies, and students wrote movie reviews. Then they filmed each other, giving Siskel and Ebert-style film reviews. The Twilight movie came out around that time, and they even wrote a spoof of the story, acted it out, and filmed it.

While researching my new Edgar Allan Poe book, The Raven Remix, I was surprised to discover that in addition to being a famous poet and short story writer, Poe was also a magazine editor and literary critic. Poe was the first writer to try to make a living solely by his literary efforts, but it was very hard. He lived much of his life in poverty. He received nine dollars for his poem "The Raven" which was not much money even in his time. 

To help support himself and his family, Poe wrote hundreds of essays, book reviews, and articles that were published in newspapers and magazines. He proposed setting specific standards to judge the merits of literary works. Whenever he critiqued a particular work, he made a detailed technical analysis and often pointed out grammar errors and illogical reasoning. The general public loved his reviews, which were often witty and clever, but the authors he critiqued were not always fans, especially when his remarks were unfavorable. Some of the contemporary authors he reviewed were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Fenimore Cooper.

I don't suggest harshly criticizing your peers, as Poe often did. He lost a lot of friends that way, but writing a book review can be helpful to others who may be interested in reading similar genres. 

Here are some tips to share with young people for writing book reviews:
 
1. Write a one-paragraph summary of the story, but don't give away the ending. Include the title of the book and the author.
2. Write one paragraph describing what you liked or disliked about the book and why others may or may not want to read it. Compare it to similar books that people may know about.
3. Write a conclusion and give the book a 1-5 star rating.

My new decodable book The Raven Remix: A Mashup of Poe Titles is now available on Ingram, Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can also order it from your favorite local bookstore.

Sign up for my newsletter HERE and receive a free copy of my first decodable book, No Gift for Man. Don't miss any of the fun-filled activities coming up for A Year of AWE: Authentic Writing Experiences.

Happy Halloween - Cause of Death Theory #4 - MURDER

Did someone want Poe dead?

Around the time of Poe's death, there were rumors that robbers had beaten him and taken his possessions, which is why he was wearing strange clothing, but what if he was beaten by someone who knew him?  Poe was engaged to marry Elmira Shelton, his high school sweetheart. When they were young, Elmira's father hid Poe's letters from her when Poe went away to college. Elmira ended up marrying another man, but when her husband died, and Poe's wife Virginia died, the two rekindled their romance.  Is it possible that someone else in the family also disapproved of the relationship? Perhaps Elmira's brothers? 

John Evangelist Walsh wrote an intriguing book called Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. He analyzed the last few weeks of Poe's life and came to the conclusion that Poe was killed by someone he knew. Was his death intentional, or was someone just trying to frighten him and they went too far? 

We may never know the real cause of Poe's death, but if you read my new book, The Raven Remix: A Mashup of Poe Titles, you will get to explore several theories about how he died. To review this month's blog posts on the subject, check out the links below.

Theory #1 came about when a strange mass was found in Poe's skull when his body was exhumed and moved to a better gravesite. 

Theory #2 was discussed in the Maryland Medical Journal.

Theory #3 can be traced back to a strange type of voter fraud prevalent in the 1800s.

Sign up HERE for the Carolee Dean, Author newsletter and receive a FREE digital copy of my book, No Gift for Man. You will also receive monthly updates, book news, and FREEBIES. 

75th Anniversary of IDA

The 75th Anniversary of IDA (International Dyslexia Association) was a stellar event. I had the chance to catch up with old friends and make many more new ones. The beautiful women pictured above are all leaders of the Western Region branches of IDA. I have been very honored to serve as their liaison for the past three years as the Western Region Representative. We all dressed up on Saturday night for a Gala Celebration. Seven Legacy Awards were given out to IDA celebrities like Dr. Reid Lyon, one of the leading experts in reading research.

My booth design got a facelift this year with graphics by Sierra Gondrez. The center of each wheel has the image of a book. The focus is to start with a book and then use the content and context to work on the domains of language (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) as well as other areas that support literacy such as decoding, executive functions, written language, reading comprehension strategies, creativity, and even articulation (for my SLP friends). 

I was thrilled that so many people stopped by to talk about decodable books for older readers and spin the wheel to win a free digital resource. I gave away 5 different online activities to promote the activity books I designed to accompany my HOT ROD series (Higher Order Learning through the Reading of Decodables). I will be highlighting these activities and more starting in January of 2025 in my newsletter, so sign up HERE if you are looking for free digital resources or just want to learn more about decodable books.

I had a blast connecting with other authors of decodable books in the exhibit hall. Top right is Jill Lauren, creator of the Whole Phonics series and her illustrator, Darren McKee. Bottom right is Elise Lovejoy, creator of Express Readers. Bottom left are Christian and Noemi, the husband and wife team from Canada who are the creators of Wacky Tat books.

 

In celebration of their 75th Anniversary, IDA has made a special 75th Anniversary Issue of Perspectives on Language and Literacy. Use the QR code above or click HERE for access. This helpful and practical publication is typically only available to members of IDA. 

Last but not least, because it ends TODAY, the IDA Speaker Showcase Online Auction ends tonight at 11pm. Check it out and fine a speaker for your next conference. I am one of the featured speakers. 

Sign up HERE for the Carolee Dean, Author newsletter and receive a FREE digital copy of my book, No Gift for Man. You will also receive monthly updates, book news, and FREEBIES.