Rip the Page! Adventures in Creative Writing

Kids are wild, wacky, and wise and those are precisely the traits that creative writers and thinkers need. Yet as kids move through the school system with its tests and grades, they too often lose their innate ability to simply have fun playing with words. Rip the Page! Adventures in Creative Writing invites children (ages eight to twelve) to pick up a pen and find out for themselves all the ways that creative writing can be their friend. This interactive book offers experiments to strengthen the write-sideo of their brains with wordplay, open-ended experiments, do-it-yourself definitions, double-dares, word lists galore, and enough blank pages to roam and rip! on their journey of discovering that playing with words is precisely what creative writers do to warm up to the page. Rip the Page! empowers kids to play with words simply for the sake of playing and it endows budding writers with confidence about finding the words they need to use to express what they mean. Kids discover their own words on their own terms. On the page, no one can argue with you, disagree with you . . . or tell you that you're wrong. The book includes encouragement from acclaimed poets and writers, including Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), Naomi Shihab Nye, Gary Soto, Annie Barrows, Lucille Clifton, Karen Cushman, Patricia Polacco, and others. To learn more about the author, visit her website at karenbenke.com.

Karen Benke has inspired children in the art of creative writing for sixteen years as a freewrite facilitator, creative writing coach, and poet-teacher in the California Poets in the Schools program, where she specializes in leading creative writing workshops for children seven to fourteen years old. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies and national literary journals. She is the recipient of two teaching grants from Poets & Writers and is a four-time grant recipient from the Marin Arts Council Fund for Artists.