Planning a year of participation in Phi Theta Kappa can be the most difficult part of a chapter’s agenda – it’s a daunting task!  So to make things a little easier, we have established a guide to some chapter activities that work.
 

Email Doug Murphy with your activity submissions.

Writing Workshop (Long)

The goal of a writing workshop is to assemble a group together and explore the concepts of poetry, fiction, or even investigative writing.  The possibilities are wide open, but for the purposes of this plan we are going to assume you wish to target children who are in intermediate or early middle school.

First, meet with your chapter and decide who you want to include in the workshop.  That will influence what you can teach them.  Decide if the writing workshop will be part of a larger activity (Reading Day, Kid’s Day).  The hardest part of this activity is preparing a lesson plan and deciding how to present it.  To help, consider the following lesson structure as a guideline for your activity:

     1.  Haiku

Tell the children about the Japanese form of the haiku.  The haiku is a three line, 5-7-5 syllable poem that attempts to create a “simple little picture in three little lines.”  Tell the children how the syllabic count should work, reviewing their knowledge of syllables if you have to.  As you prepare your lesson, prepare a Haiku and think of a picture you can draw that represents the haiku.  After you’ve told the children about the haiku draw a rough picture on the board.  You might say, “I bet you guys doodle like this a lot.”  Then follow up by reading the much more descriptive haiku.

You will want to follow up with some haiku that is expressive and funny.  The following haiku by Etheridge Knight is a good choice:

               Making jazz swing in

               Seventeen syllables AIN’T

               No square poet’s job.

Now ask the children to write their own haiku – they should try to follow the syllabic form, but it’s okay if they are off a little.  Tell the children that they can take unrelated ideas and combine them with their haiku, or they can just paint a picture.  An example of the unrelated ideas haiku is below, written by Doug Murphy.

          A bowl of noodles

          full of rich, savory broth

          should taste great in jail.

          Some examples of the painted picture haiku are below:

          an old man stumbles

          through streets of ice-drenched water

          cursing the gray sky

          A bright, longing hope

          lost in a thousand winters

          the snow falls tonight.

     2. Character design

Character design can be a pretty complicated task, but we want to simplify things for our group of children.  The aspect of characters we want to emphasize is that characters must have “warts” that make them unique.  For example, brown hair is all nice and fine, but is it short or long hair?  Is the brown hair in waves, or is it slender and sleek?  Does it have decorative pins in it?  Is it neatly combed or messy?  Aside from looks, we also want the children to consider behaviors, hopes, bad habits, and abilities.

To help the children grasp these concepts have a picture (maybe a poster) from a movie or popular cartoon they should be familiar with.  Discuss how the character looks, pointing out quirks such as messy hair, thick brown frames on eyeglasses (as opposed to neat eyeglasses), and discuss things the character does that makes him or her unique.

Now we want the children to design their own character.  It is important to tell the children they don’t have to design everything at once – they can leave out some things if they draw a blank.  But it is important to provide the children with as many options as possible – some people will have creativity in behavior, while others may concentrate on appearance.

Let’s ask the children to use the following attributes to design a character:

          Archetype: (Hero, destroyer, seeker, warrior, wisdom, child – Use a simplified description such as "character type" using examples from movies and video games.)

          Name

          Age

          Gender

          Hair (remind them to pick a hairstyle)

          Body build

          Clothing

          Unique abilities:

          Traits (curious, easily angered, quiet.  Also – fearless, determined, obsessive.)

          Hopes and Goals (what kind of job, does he/she want a wife/husband, or a certain skill?)

          Central goal (affects goals – to help others, to be secure/safe, to make money, to be left alone)

          Fears (fear of not completing goals, as well as personal insecurities – afraid of rejection)

          Unusual ticks (does the character blink a lot, or have an icy stare?  Is she obsessed with a color?)

          Bad habits (doesn’t brush teeth, smokes, takes risks ala climbing large trees)

          Favorite activities

          Character’s hero

          Favorite topic

          Keepsake (any item that is special to the character)

     3.  Plot design

Interestingly enough, character design seems to be the most complicated section of this workshop – but that’s okay because it covers ideas that the children are already familiar with.  Plot design should have fewer elements to explain.  Ask the children to talk about a movie they really enjoyed and discuss the plot complications that the characters had to overcome.

Tell the children that a story consists of four phases – introduction, complication, climax, and resolution.   Introduction describes characters and setting.  The complication section of the story will present the characters with problems that they must overcome.  Maybe an evil villain’s army is invading, or a kid at school is getting into trouble because he’s been framed.  The climax is the final confrontation with these complications – a moment of heightened conflict.  In the evil villain story, perhaps the hero finds a way to sneak behind the army and defeat the evil leader – if the hero wins, his or her people are safe, but if he loses all is wasted.  A battle like that can only occur once.  In the kid at school example, perhaps the hero decides to turn the tide on his accusers by fooling them into getting caught while they are doing no good.  In this climax, the kid has managed to overhear a secret and has perhaps fouled up their plans (a firecracker to attract attention).  When the other kids are caught, our hero’s reputation is restored, but if they aren’t caught and he is traced to the commotion it is all ruin!  The resolution of the story is just “life after the climax” and shows how the hero’s actions have restored things to the way they should be.

With that in mind, we want to ask the children to design a simple complication outline for a story.  Ask the children to introduce one or two characters (they can use their previous character or ignore it), and then draft a few simple complications.  Tell the children they can use a theme to make this easier – “a hard day at school” or, “finding out you made bad grades.”  Remind them that complications can be small – for example, your teacher hands you a report card with bad grades on it.  Then maybe she hands you a note that you have to return, signed from your parents.  To get out of trouble, maybe our character throws away the report card and the note – but someone finds it, and the character has to convince them to give it back.  Then our protagonist faces up to reality and gives his parents the card and note.

Draw the diagram of the aristotelean plotline (it has several names, looks like __/`\) to let the children visualize the complications, then set them to writing.  Give them 15 or 20 minutes to write, then invite them to discuss their story ideas.  Be positive – they will present you with simple stories, but we want to encourage them to continue working on their ideas.  That’s the crunch of the activity – be sure to thank your hosts (if you are presenting elsewhere) or thank your visitors for attending (if you are hosting).  You may have just altered the path of a child’s life!

Ronald McDonald House

     This is a pretty easy event - just locate the nearest Ronald McDonald House, call them, and offer to visit and cook dinner every couple of weeks. The RMH serves parents who need a place to stay close to seriously ill children while they are in hospitals. These parents are uniquely burdened, so anything your chapter can do to help will be appreciated. Just make sure you know how many people you are feeding and you should be fine.

Support Shelters for abused and homeless citizens

Support a local shelter by donating items such as food and clothing.  Organize a donation drive at your college to help.  If you have access to a home for children, organize activities such as face painting, home-made ice cream dinners, and sports events.  Be advised that such shelters have strict privacy requirements, so you may not be able to take pictures.

Visit an Elder

Visit a senior citizen who may be lonely - you can keep him or her company, and learn about the past at the same time.

Culture Cookout

Gather cooks from various cultures and invite them to join you for a culture cookout at your college.  Attendees can sample tasty entrees and meet great new friends!  Phi Theta Kappa members can learn about the honors study topic.

Kid's Day

Invite various public services to your campus, such as firemen, medical workers, and police.  Have the officials discuss their jobs to children, and address safety concerns and techniques that may be useful for every day situations.  Spice it up with some games, prizes (books!) and you've got yourself an activity to remember.