Category: GKP Writing News

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GKP Writing News

Teaching Literacy

Few people remember Dr. Frank C. Laubach today. They do benefit from his legacy of teaching literacy.

Who Was Dr. Laubach?

Born in 1884 in Benton, Pennsylvania, the future Dr. Laubach was like most of the boys growing up in a small rural town. One difference was his love of reading. That carried him through a few years teaching before going on to Princeton. He was spiritual and interested in missionary work.

Dr. Laubach and his wife Effie began their lives as missionaries in 1915 in the Philippines. He planned on working among the Muslims on the southern islands, but there was too much turmoil.

The Philippines

Ferdinand Magellan claimed the islands for Spain in 1521. The Spanish had just driven the Moors out of Spain. When he found Muslims living in the Philippines, he called them “Moros”, and considered them enemies setting the stage for centuries of wars between the Spanish and the Muslims.

The United States took over the Philippines in 1898 as part of the settlement for the Spanish-American War. The Muslims didn’t think this was an improvement.

Teaching Literacy

After years of doing other work in the Phillippines, Dr. Laubach finally started work in Lanao in the south in 1929. He was an outsider and viewed with suspicion by the inhabitants.

In the evening Dr. Laubach would climb a hill to watch the sunset. It was there he realized he was the problem. He felt he was better than they were because he was white. So he began listening to the people.

Maranao was an unwritten language. A few hadjis and panditas, heads of the villages, could read Arabic. No one else was literate. Maranao became the first language Dr. Laubach developed an alphabet for and wrote dictionary and grammar books for.

The motto was “Each one, Teach one” as Dr. Laubach taught one person to read and write their own language and that person was to teach another in his village. This spread as he went on to develop books for other languages.

cover for "Waiting For Fairies" by Karen GoatKeeper
Using picture books for adults to practice reading has problems as adults want more serious topics. The same is true for many easy reading titles.

Laubach’s Legacy

At his death, Dr. Laubach had developed materials for teaching literacy to adults in 103 languages including English. These were simple enough for ordinary people to learn the material and teach illiterate adults or immigrants to read and write.

Illiteracy is a problem in the United States. Up to one in five people can not read well enough to fill out a job application. The government now offers classes to help these people to learn to read. But these aren’t enough and often aren’t stressed for new immigrants dooming them to day work or other exploitation by unscrupulous employers.

Teaching literacy was a problem in Jane Addams’ day, one she wrote about in “Twenty Years at Hull House” (review on Goodreads). Her solution, Dr. Laubach’s solution and one we should recognize and implement, is to teach and encourage literacy with the opportunity to learn and books people want to read.

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Finishing The Little Spider

Putting ‘The End’ on a book is always exciting and a relief. This is especially true for a book that has taken years. Finishing “The Little Spider” is one of those.

I wrote the text draft years ago. That was the easy part. Picture books require illustrations. That was the hard part.

Getting Picture Book Illustrations

When the text got written, I did no drawing. I wrote. Period.

So I talked to several people who did draw. No one was willing to take this project on. So the text sat on my computer, moved to two new computers, waited.

Then I ended up doing the illustrations for “For Love of Goats”. Finding anyone else was not really an option as I wanted good illustrations for half a dozen different breeds of goats. They may all be goats, but they don’t look alike. It’s like both an Arabian and a Quarter Horse are both horses, but they don’t look exactly alike.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
One advantage of doing my own illustrations is getting the ones I want, the ones I’ve pictured in my mind as fitting the story. This was certainly true in “For Love of Goats”, my book of tongue twisters, alliterative stories, short fiction and memories of goats and goatkeeping. I’m glad I can do the illustrations well enough for publishing, an important consideration.

Gaining Confidence

After finding I could really do the illustrations, I got brave. I tackled the illustrations for “Waiting for Fairies”. The different animals weren’t that hard. People are hard to draw. I’m glad little children are so forgiving about illustrations.

So now I’m finishing “The Little Spider” illustrations. Actually all of them are done now. There are two things left.

One is a border for the last page about spider ballooning, the topic of the story. I could leave the text on its own, but a little border of the little spider running around the text would be fun.

What should I put on the cover? Obviously, the little spider goes on the cover. I haven’t decided what the spider will be doing or how the title and author name will go around it.

The Final Steps

Once I have those two things done, I can start the process of getting the book printed. Although there will be eBook versions, the conversions seem to distort the images. I don’t know how to fix this problem.

One thing is certain. Finishing “The Little Spider” will open up some writing time. Of course that is already filled with three other projects.

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Garden Spider Watching

Two big tubs sit near the back porch. Each contains a tomato plant. Besides picking cherry tomatoes to eat, we get to do some garden spider watching.

These black and yellow zipper spiders are not as common as they were years ago. The changing weather patterns might be the reason with late frosts and droughts. That makes it special to have such a beauty right outside the back door.

Another reason this is special is my work on “The Little Spider” picture book. The spiderling grows up into a big black and yellow beauty.

"The Little Spider" is a picture book by Karen GoatKeeper and will be published in Fall, 2023.
“The Little Spider” is a picture book by Karen GoatKeeper and will be published in Fall, 2023.

Orb Weaving Spiders

Late summer into fall is a good time to spot these architectural masters. They hatch out in the spring, but stay small and inconspicuous until now.

Summer is insect bonanza time and these small spiders start growing into big adults. We’ve seen this garden spider watching as ours doubled in size in a couple of weeks.

Every morning this female spider spins a new web. Knowing the spider is nearly blind, seeing only light and shadow, and spins this large web only by feel makes it even more amazing.

garden spider watching
Spiders are amazing creatures. Watching one spin a web is fascinating. They eat lots of insects and these never get immune as they do to insecticides that poison more than the insects. This zipper garden spider will produce an egg case soon.

Patient Hunters

All day the spider hangs mead downwards on the zipper in the center of her web. The big spiders are all females.

A male came to call last week. He is a quarter of the size of the female. He spun a little web close to hers and carefully courted her until she invited him to call.

The male is gone, escaped safely to court another spider somewhere else. The female is now trying to put on a lot of size and weight. Her web is bigger with more stickly strands.

The nearby rain barrels catch various insects. We turn wasps, bees and the like loose. However, Japanese beetles and grasshoppers get tossed into the spider web.

The spider pounces, backs off a minute or so, moves back in and wraps ther catch up in silk. About five minutes later, she moves in for a meal.

End of Summer

In time the spider will spin an egg cocoon. When frost comes, she will die. That will bring an end to this year’s garden spider watching. Maybe one of her spiderlings will stay so we can do the same next year.    

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Chemistry Teaching Units

It’s August. Many homeschool people are busy choosing chemistry teaching units for this upcoming school year. And mine aren’t available yet.

The City Water Project teaching units are up on Teachers Pay Teachers. These are fun during the summer. Some of the Investigations and Activities can be done inside, but water rockets are definitely an outside activity.

doing digital and print versions requires a title page
Title pages are both challenging and fun to create. For the teaching units I try to keep them simple.

Setting Up Chemistry Teaching Units

My science activity books have several parts. One part has the Investigations and Activities. These are somewhat similar. The first are more like lab work. The latter can be fun stuff.

Another part is composed of pencil puzzles like word searches, deduction problems, quote puzzles, coloring pages. I devise all of these myself and have found doing them for chemistry challenging.

Chem Notes are scattered throughout the unit. These are information/trivia sentences. For chemistry, many are related to the history of chemistry.

Each unit contains a story. For the unit on matter, the story is about flour as flour is used for two Activities. The solutions unit will have a story about making pottery as the clay is a mixture.

These Take Time

I’ll admit it. I’ve been working on the Little Spider illustrations when I should be working on chemistry.

I thought my time would stretch for both. It doesn’t. Each illustration is complex and takes far longer than I anticipated.

Each chemistry teaching unit takes time too. Several are set up. Most need the Chem Story finished. All need the Chem Notes. And I need to redo a few Investigations.

Everything Will Get Done

I keep telling myself exactly this. It is true. If I keep working on one illustration a day, “The Little Spider” will be done in just over three weeks from now.

And the chemistry teaching units will be put up on Teachers Pay Teachers. The first one needs some Chem Notes to finish it.

Is it on chemistry? Sort of. It’s on the metric system, using a scale and significant figures. These are important concepts for the rest of the units.

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Creating Picture Book Pages

When I painted the panels for “Waiting For Fairies”, I painted the entire picture each time. However, I didn’t do that for “For Love of Goats”. Creating picture book pages depends on the illustrations for me.

watercolor image of little spider begins creating picture book pages
My first step for creating the pages for “The Little Spider” was to sketch, then watercolor the main images. The story is about a little spider that goes ballooning to a new home. this image is when the little spider is airborne.

Combining Watercolor and Computer

My picture book pages always begin with watercolor. First I do a rough sketch. Then I add the paint.

As I do the sketches, I am already looking over my ideas for the final illustrations. Although it’s great to do the entire picture in watercolor, sometimes using the computer to do some of it is better. This will be true for “The Little Spider”.

This is especially true for the text. I love doing the lettering, but rarely have all of the text look alike. The computer does all the text with the same lettering making it much easier to read which is important in a picture book.

adding background while creating picture book pages
For this picture book I am combining computer and watercolor images. For this page I started a new page and put a full light blue color. The watercolor image is selected using freehand selection keeping as close to the image as possible. It is copied onto the blue background. Then comes the tedious task of removing any white surrounding the image. I prefer using the eraser rather than painting to do this. It takes several passes using progressively smaller erasers.

“The Little Spider” Illustrations

My watercolor panels are very spare. They tell a simple story. Because the little spider lives in an area with lots of background that obscures that story, I don’t want to add much of it.

To achieve this, I have painted background panels. One is of the ground. It is mostly in shades of brown.

However, this is boring. So another panel has various objects such a small ferns, leaves, rocks, sticks etc. When I add ground to a panel, a few of these objects will get added too.

adding text for creating picture book pages
In my opinion the text in a picture book needs to be simple and easy to read. Personally I like using Georgia font as I like serifs and the rounder shapes than found in Times New Roman. The image has been narrowed for web viewing, so the text may be adjusted later. However, this is close to my final page for this panel. It took close to an hour to complete from creating the background color to adding the text. And this is one of the simpler pages out of the thirty-two for the book.

Background Colors

The sky will appear in several of the illustrations. Yes, I could do a wash of blue. My washes tend to have brush strokes and I would prefer not to have these in the illustrations.

Instead I will use a computer generated blue panel. This makes the sky a flat blue which it is and keeps it definitely in the background with the story scene on top of it.

The same is true of other scenes where I want a green background, but not one to overshadow the watercolor panels. I can add a few grass plants onto the flat background.

Creating picture book pages takes lots of planning and time. For me it also takes combining watercolor and computer to get just the illustrations I want.

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“The Last Train From Hiroshima” Book Review

The world and war changed on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. Tokyo time. If all you know about that day and August 9, 1945, is that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, flattened the cities, killed thousands of people and ended World War II, you are the victim of the spin doctors. “The Last Train From Hiroshima” by Charles Pellegrino tells the stories of the survivors and victims of both sides relating what really happened.

History, real history, is more than names, dates and heroic deeds. It is littered with people and events that make you feel uncomfortable. Yet, if that history is white washed, it will happen again. The purpose of looking at history is to learn from the mistakes and decisions of the past. And, as many have known for years, people can learn more from their mistakes than their successes.

Story of Hiroshima

Why do we learn so little about what actually happened on those days? General MacArthur laid out his Protocol forbidding survivors from talking about what happened. He curtailed any scientific research about it. He confiscated and classified written information about it. Then he and the Japanese government put out their sanitized versions.

John Hershey managed to gather and publish some of what did happen. His book, “Hiroshima” follows six survivors on that day and for some days afterwards. Dr. Paul Takashi Nagai published “The Bells of Nagasaki”, the story of his survival and the efforts of the University medical school personel and became the focus of a smear campaign.

Atomic Bomb Trivia

Did you know the Hiroshima bomb was a dud? Only around 10% of it exploded.

How does an atomic bomb explode? It isn’t one explosion, but a series of waves each carrying its own type of destruction.

How many people died? No one knows or will ever know.

Why did some people survive even though they were close to the explosion? Some of the Hiroshima survivors took that Last Train from Hiroshima just in time for the second bomb and survived that one too.

And the second bomb didn’t explode over Nagasaki, but its suburb Urikami, just over a little hill. This made it easy to hide the true effects of the second bomb which was a plutonium bomb, not an atom bomb and three times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Yet, this bomb has been relegated to little more than a sentence or two in the history books.

Aftermath

Few people knew about the effects of radiation. People without a scratch on them would sicken and die days, weeks or years later as speculation about what was wrong proliferated. These effects too were mostly hidden from the public.

Some older survivors of one or both bombs lived long lives advocating for peace. They had lived through hell and didn’t want anyone else to have to. Masahiro Sasaki summed it up this way: “It’s been more than sixty years since the bombs were dropped. God made everyone equal. So, I forgot who dropped the bomb. What I am trying to say is that it does not matter who dropped the bomb. It’s not an issue. It should never be an issue for any country. It’s an issue for all humanity.

“The important thing is that I, and Sadako (his sister who folded paper cranes as she was dying cancer caused by radiation), knew the feeling of Omiyari (In your heart, always think about the other person before yourself.) – and if this principle can be taken to heart and passed down by just a few of you here in this room today, it may, in time, lessen the dangers in the world.”

This is an excellently written book. It is objective, not dwelling on gory details. That does not make this an easy book to read.

My ratings and book reviews of both “Last Train from Hiroshima” and “The Bells of Nagasaki” are on Goodreads.

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Coloring Little Spider

Coloring Little Spider is the easy part. Sort of. Getting all the sketches done was the difficult part.

Planning “The Little Spider”

I did have a rough text list for this picture book. However, as I did the sketches, some of the text didn’t work. There wasn’t enough of it for all the pages of the book.

I went back to the computer and started creating pages. The first one was the title page. then a copyright page. Neither one had a sketch.

Then each drawing was matched to a page and the text was written on the page. Another wrinkle to doing this was keeping the pages on the correct side. There is a right facing page (odd numbers) and a left facing page (even numbers).

Some of the pages didn’t have sketches. These were added to the stack.

Coloring Little Spider

Baby spiders called spiderlings are not the same color as adult spiders usually. Different kinds of spiders have different shapes.

My little spider is a composite, but mostly garden spider. I laid out my paints.

Greens were needed for the plants. Little spider needed ocher yellow, gray and black. Webs and spider silk are white, but this wouldn’t show up, so I’m using thin black lines.

coloring little spider and her journey
The little spider says “The day is warm. I feel the wind. I must hurry.” Why? Follow along to find out as the little spider leaves her web behind and searches for a high place. Her first attempt is a long blade of grass as shown in this image.

Patience?

I like watercolor. It has a really nice look to it and is versatile. Texture comes from layering the paint. Tones come from adding water.

That is the drawback to watercolor. It is a water-based paint. Each color must dry thoroughly before the next one is added.

This takes patience. Rushing lets the colors bleed into one another. I’m not good at patience.

My solution is to work on several sketches at a time. One round I spend coloring little spider. Another round I paint the grass. Still another round is for adding legs to little spider.

This first time through the sketches won’t finish them. I will go back over them to add more texture to the grasses and stems and branches.

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Social Media

“Hopes, Dreams and Reality” will be available to readers by next week. That leaves me looking at more ways to let people know about my new book. The suggestion so many have is to be on social media.

Irritatingly, people and businesses assume everyone is on these various platforms. The only two I am on are Pinterest and Goodreads. There are no plans to be on any of the others.

Hopes, Dreams and Reality cover
As I launch this new novel, my dream is for people to notice and read it. But people won’t notice it unless I can let them know it exists.

Why Not be on Social Media?

Time is a big reason I am not on these platforms. Since I am not online at home, my internet time is very limited, usually about five hours a week. This does not go very far.

Perhaps I could be online at home, but the service stinks. There is good service up on top of the hill because a teacher lives there and it was put in for virtual teaching. Those lines do not come down to me and won’t any time soon.

That leaves me with slow, unrealiable service be it through the phone company or satellite. It’s much cheaper and better to use the internet at the library, so that is what I do.

Nor can I use a cell phone to access the internet. Well, I suppose I could, if I wanted to go hiking across the creek, down two pastures and up on a hill to find service.

Privacy

Another big reason for me to not be on social media is privacy. The companies behind these platforms only want to sell me things I have no use for or sell my information to others who want to sell me things I do not want. It’s bad enough using Yahoo.

Yes, I do know privacy is a thing of the past. However, I enjoy the illusion.

Even more chilling for me is the amount of misinformation found on these platforms. I am not interested in sifting through the lies, the political rhetoric, the deceptions, the frauds and more.

When you do seek information, how do you know it’s for real? I’m reminded of a cartoon from some magazine of a dog at a computer saying “Online, no one knows you’re a dog.”

Where does this leave me?

It leaves me a website few people visit. It leaves me a network of people I know through Goodreads and NaNo (National Novel Writing Month).

My first promotion of Hopes, Dreams and Reality” will be free downloads through Smashwords for two weeks. If you are reading this and wish to take advantage of this offer, I would really appreciate it if you would leave a positive review of the book on its Smashwords or Amazon book page.

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Designing Picture Books

Designing picture books is challenging. I’m wrestling with this now as I do sketches for “The Little Spider”.

If you think all you need are a bunch of related illustrations and some simple text, you are not writing and have never written such a book.

The Framework

There are two themes to a picture book. One is the text story. The other is the picture story. They are separate, yet they merge the two into a whole.

Although these books are no longer limited to 32 pages, they do usually have a page total divisible by four. This has to do with how the books are printed.

The Text

The amount of text depends on the age range of the intended reader or listener. Very young children have books with very little text with a limited vocabulary. Very good examples were written by Dr. Seuss.

As the age of the reader increases, the amount of text increases. The books become more like illustrated stories.

“The Little Spider” is for the younger set so the text is limited and repetitive. The illustrations help by showing what the text is talking about.

photographs for designing picture books
One of the little spider’s adventures is meeting up with a bee in a flower. I took the camera out as the little spider was climbing a chicory stem and met a green native bee in a flower. The bees are camera shy, but I persevered. This picture became a model for some picture book sketches.

The Illustrations

Often the person doing the illustrations is not the person doing the text. Instead, that person is known for their art be it watercolor, pen and ink, decoupage, pencil or many other possibilities.

I and many other authors do both the text and illustrations. This gives the author more control over how the two work together in the book.

“The Little Spider”

This book is a simple story of a small spider that balloons to a new location. To do this, the little spider must find a high place and spin a line of silk for the wind to carry it off.

In designing picture books like this one, I first write out a series of text lines. The repetitive line is “The day is warm. I feel the wind. I must hurry.” This is found on the left page as the little spider ends each attempt and goes on to the next. The next action begins on the right page.

So far, my little spider has had seven attempts covering 14 pages. That leaves me devising seven more adventures.

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The Little Spider

In late spring long lines of spider silk waft across the yard. These are single strands, not webs. “The Little Spider” was written as I found out more about these gossamer strands.

Lots of spiders call my place home. They come in many sizes and colors. They are welcome as they help decimate the fly and mosquito populations. The orb web weavers are the main ones to make gossamer silk in the spring.

Spring Spiders

Wolf and jumping spiders survive the winter hidden in building crevices or leaf litter in the woods. They come out on warm winter days and in the spring. By summer these have laid eggs that hatch over the summer into fall. These rarely make gossamer silk.

The Little Spider was once an egg in a case
In late summer the large garden spiders – all females – mate and create egg cases like these. The spiders will die with frost. The egg cases will survive the winter protecting the eggs inside. These will become baby spiders once spring warms the area.

Orb weaving spiders die in the fall. They leave behind silken egg containers filled with eggs that hatch in the spring (Remember “Charlotte’s Web”?). These spiderlings scatter and build tiny webs in the grass. I see them decorated with dew shining in the morning sun.

These spiderlings are nearly blind as were their parents. However they do want to move away into their own territories so they can get more food.

Spiders On the Move

Tiny spiderlings may run fast, but it takes a long time for them to go any distance simply because they are so small. “The Little Spider” is about such a little spiderling that wants to move and has a way to go a great distance.

When the temperature is warm and the air has a slight updraft, spiderlings find a high place to stand. They spin a strand of gossamer silk. The air catches the silk and pulls it upward.

When the silk is long enough, the pull is great enough for the spiderling to be pulled aloft. This is called ballooning.

How Far?

Although most spiderlings don’t drift very far, others do. They have been found thousands of feet in the air on airplanes or miles out to sea on ships. Some cross the English Channel.

gossamer spider silk on pasture
Gossamer silk spreads across the pasture after spiders go ballooning and return to earth. A few build webs soon after landing.

After landing, the spiderlings cut loose their silk strand. These gossamer strands are left spread across pastures, buildings or blowing in the wind.

This journey is the story in my proposed picture book “The Little Spider”. Being a picture book, illustrations are important and take a long time to do. They begin with the sketches I am doing now just as a tiny spider’s journey begins with finding that high spot.