I'm a fairly good artist, but I know not everyone is like me. Even I'm not that good at one of the most important parts of writin...

I've taught this lesson twice now with two different sets of fourth graders. I was amazed at how differently each group pursued this task. I had each write original legends. The first group made maps to illustrate their already completed short stories. This year's group used the maps to continue plotting their stories. Once they had the places drawn on their maps, it caused them to revise their legends in a more logical way. Stop by Artistry of Education to download two versions of this map key.

I’m currently researching how to teach (my oldest) the art of conversation. She’s been given the gift of gab. And although I know we can use her ‘power’ for good, it someti…

I’ve realised I have a particular workflow for drawing coastlines in my maps. Here’s a quick walkthrough. Each step is done on a new layer in photoshop, and I use a 5px hard round brush in each case with size set to pressure. However, all of these steps can be done in Gimp – or … Continue reading "How to Draw Coastlines on a Fantasy Map"

I have been to all of these places and will return to each a thousand times more. I am currently headed to the Glade of Hopeful Aspirations after a bout in Crippling Insecurity-ville. How about y…

Help your primary grade students explore, learn, and write about landforms. See our hands-on landforms activities plus our culminating writing project!

There are lots of ways to indicate water on a map with lines – and many more with tone or colour. Here are four I regularly use. 1. Broken Waves After you have your coastline, use short, gently curving lines along the shore. The lines should follow the shapes of the coast, but smooth out … Continue reading "4 Coast Styles for Mapmaking"

Call me a grouchy old lady, but I have never been a big fan of TikTok as a platform. That being said, I recently discovered the art trend of rice fantasy maps. As a lifelong fantasy nerd, I have become obsessed. In this art trend, you pour rice over a sheet of drawing or watercolor paper

Use this fairy tale story map to follow the details of your child's favorite stories and strengthen his reading skills.

Creating city maps can be hard. Here's four quick steps I use to design believable town and city maps.

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individ…

Rivers have to be the most common thing for new map makers to get wrong; and even seasoned cartographers may have some of these mistakes sneak up on them if they’re not careful. But, having an awareness of some of the most common issues that come up when it comes to river placement will go a long wa

One of the tools we use in feng shui is called the Feng Shui Bagua Map (which literally means, eight areas). Each of these areas represent a significant area of lives, including family, career, wealth, and relationships. Our homes are energetically-connected to our bodies and our lives. This connection influences us at a profound level. […]

The graphic is intended as a mind map or a checklist for kick-starting world-building exercises. At its heart, it reminds us that things are connected.

A Rough Guide to Castle Design Part 3 – The Floorplan by Jon Roberts To collect and transform the room list into a sensible layout I make a flowchart, finding this to be a simple way to list …

@learnwithmsm uses Google Drawings to make Mind Maps with her 2nd and 3rd graders. The drawing above provides a few tips for students to help them create

Yeah, you caught me, this is actually a graphical version of the tutorial I posted several years ago. But I’ve had a lot of demand for graphical tutorials ever since Dysonize Your Dungeon wen…

What is a realistic population size for a medieval or ancient fantasy setting? Should a city have a couple of million people? How about 500,000 or 20,000? Let’s delve in and give you some simple guidelines as well as a cheat sheet you can easily reference as you are writing your story and drawing yo

Make this viking people craft with paper, crayons, glue and scissors. Then color a map of the Viking raiding and trading routes along with some settlements.

Our planet is mostly water - seas and oceans making the most of it. Your worlds, fantasy or sci-fi, are going to have to have large bodies of water. But how do you draw the ocean to your maps? Last time, I discussed my style of drawing mountains and

I was so looking forward to our introduction to Ancient Africa and the Anansi Tales, so in preparation, I went to the library for some Anansi Books. The Anansi Tales, sometimes referred to as "Trickster Tales" sometimes portray Anansi, the lead character as a spider and sometimes as a man. He is sometimes mentioned as an Africa god and sometimes as a trickster who is played by the gods. But most of the time, the tales follow a similar pattern: Anansi attempts to trick and is fooled himself, or someone is trying to trick Anansi and he ends up doing the fooling. Anansi as a spider AND as a man. Now, I am always on the lookout for Literacy activities to follow up a good story. And often, I end up creating them myself. So I'm going to share a bit of what I came up with to go along with these delightful stories. This packet should work with any of the Anansi stories. First, I wanted to make a printable Anansi the Spider. Because sometimes, you just need a print and go craft. Only other items needed here will be scissors, and either tape or glue. But I wanted a follow-up activity to help with character mapping. Because the Anansi stories are generally predictable, Anansi is a perfect subject to use for honing in on characteristics. So, here: students can brainstorm as a class or group about various characteristics, and then choose one of those characteristics to complete the sentence. But what if you have just read a story where Anansi is portrayed as a man? If you have the ability to take photos of your young readers, this could be a fun activity to implement: turn them into little Anansis: With this half man/half spider persona, they can put themselves in Anansi's shoes: Yes, that is my daughter's photo used as the spider head. Here's what else we used: Glue, black pepper, a pom pom and a small photo. There are many ways to create a little spider on this African image, but this was what we did: glue is drawn for legs and pepper is sprinkled over. Then we glued a black pompom in the center of the legs and added the photo to the top of that! So quick, so easy, so fun. It was a fun intro to the Anansi Tales, and this craft, along with another Anansi story is available in our Anansi Tales Reading Literacy Packet in our store. If you'd like additional African tales that branch out from Anansi, let me recommend the children's book author, Verna Aardema. Almost every picture book she has written is a beautiful tale of Africa. Some of my favorites are Koi and the Kola Nuts, Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears and Anansi Finds a Fool. Another item included in our reading packet is a map of Africa in both color and black and white. Now, I wanted to do a project involving the African continent and I had seen this beautiful piece of art online: If I could figure out who created it, I would give credit, but I could only find this image. Still, it was so inspiring I thought I'd like to try to recreate something like it. So we sketched a map of Africa on cardstock and laid out some broken crayons along the edge with tape. We got out the blow dryer and tried blowing outward from the map. We went on, all the way around and then removed all the crayons. There were splotches of melted crayon in the center, too. We cut out the center Africa shape. The wax parts cut easily, too. Then we glued the whole thing to a new piece of cardstock so we could see the beautiful shape of Africa very clearly. A fun craft and even if a little time-consuming, it definitely gave us a satisfying completed project and I think this will help my son remember the shape of Africa and the Anansi Tales which spring from it! What other ideas do you have for Anansi Activities? Please share in the comments below!

Tineke Bryson, Staff Writer In last week’s post we tackled the intimidation many of us feel about creating a map for our novels. (Thanks, no thanks, J. R. R. Tolkien.) This week we focus on why we can’t afford to give up the dream or hand off the project to someone else.

Use this simple bubble map to help your students draw inferences while reading literature. Inferences are written in the bubbles, and details to help make the inference are written on the lines. This is a great activity for the students to do individually, in small groups, or whole group.

I’m pleased to announce that Meryath’s poster map is ready to go to the printer. This one’s story is as long as the Great Caldera’s (see my previous blog articles). The two were developed concurrently, as soon as we had a viable coastal outline. Some of Meryath’s geographical details carried over to the Great Caldera map, while some of latter’s graphic styling, especially the labels’ fonts and color scheme, found its way into Meryath’s poster map after Thorfinn and I settled final cosmetic details. At a glance, Meryath’s poster map relates directly to Mystara’s Gazetteer maps, although hex symbols were altered to avoid copyright issues. Our favorite Master Cartographer designed new topographical symbols (hills, mountains, forests, etc) and selected their colors. I drew the tower, village, and various town symbols, besides generating basic map details. The process then got very technical. I initially transferred the original coastline to Hexographer, the software by Inkwell Ideas which I have been using for the past three years to draw Alphatia’s regional maps on this blog. This was the simplest way for me to complete a preliminary draft, which you all saw on the Kickstarter page. This goes back to November 2013. The trouble was that I selected Hexographer’s “fractal” polygon setting to duplicate the original coastline. This introduced small discrepancies all along the shores. It looked good from a distance, but when closeups became needed, the discrepancies became an issue. Selecting straight lines or curves for the polygon settings didn’t look right either. Thankfully, our Master Cartographer converted my Hexo draft for use with his software. This fixed the coasts, making them perfectly identical to the Great Caldera source map. As I mentioned in earlier blog entries, the original map labels were scrapped almost entirely in favor of Polynesian-sounding names. I couldn’t just “recopy” those from Ierendi, which is the general source of inspiration for Meryath. For best effect I hit the net for Tahitian dictionaries and such. After a hundred-plus labels, some actually came from Tahitian words, a few crept in which sounded more like Hawai’ian, Fidjian, Marquesan, alongside others I made up entirely. Many words were twisted around for the sake of generating labels, so those are probably gibberish, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up actually meaning something hilarious in Tahitian or utterly offensive (my apologies for the latter, if ever I contributed such; for all I know, "Karakara" might in fact refer to some kind of horny swine.) Toward the end I found a large document listing many Tahitian terms completely unavailable from dictionaries and online translators. This one was very convenient and revealing of Tahitian culture, detailing myriad canoe parts, charms and blessings for sailing, food preparation words, a host of different types of breadfruit, small animals, etc. Along the way, I found out that “Moorea,” the real-world Tahitian island, actually means “yellow lizard” (Mo’o + re’are’a—sounds a bit like Moria, doesn’t it?) That’s how I ended up with a Mo’o River. My favorite was the “Tiamimi” (a small poisonous crab), which became “Tiamimi Sands,” a long beach on Meryath’s southern coast. Nonetheless, the challenge here is that the Tahitian alphabet contains far fewer letters than in western European languages (a, e, f, h, i, m, n, o, p, r, t, u, v). There are no “g,” “h,” “k,” or “w” in Tahitian, although there are plenty of them in Meryath’s fantasy Talikai dialect. Compare this with the Hawai’ian alphabet (a, b, d, e, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, t, u, v, w). Both languages use a ton of diphthongs and apostrophes, but for the sake of readability to us non-Polynesian ignoramuses (ignorami?), I had to stick with short words and vastly simplify others, often beyond recognition. Ignorance is bliss. We’ll have to assume “foreign” letters to be the result of Ellyrian and Narwani influences. Our Master Cartographer reassembled this Humpty-Dumpty islander world, and added other fine bits such as the map key, the scale bar, and the banner. The key is expanded from the standard Mystara design. There are now different mountain heights and single peaks, for example. The entire key isn’t shown on the map, however, as all terrain types presently available could not fit (nor did they need to be displayed). Remaining true to my old habits, I suggested adding Meryath’s coat of arms. Using another app from Inkwell Ideas, not so-surprisingly called Coat of Arms, I generated a basic design. In short it refers to the sea, at the bottom, since the Talikai are descendents of the Manaani “Sea People” who colonized this part of the Great Caldera. The top section is gold with a red dragon. This refers to the history at the kingdom’s core, which you will discover in the book. Looking at the project’s storyboard, an extra half-page map was needed to display the region around Glorathon. I originally used a section of the hex map, and added the extra labels for roads, rivers, and other local details. Thorfinn then suggested a different approach. He cropped a section of the Great Caldera map, and laid in a hex grid and Gazetteer-like symbols over it. So here we have it, a hybrid natural/topographic map using a hex grid and stylized symbols. I liked that one better and decided to go along with the idea. I’m sure you’ll agree it has a character of its own. The image posted below is an earlier version (a few tweaks are in the works as I type these words). So far, we have five geographic map styles. First is a stylized world map showing continents, climatic zones, as well as wind and sea currents. The Great Caldera’s natural/topographical style is more appropriate for single continents or large regions. The Gazetteer hex map style is intended for specific kingdoms—one of the reasons behind this decision (besides a desire to stay true to the old Mystara Gazetteer/BECMI Isle of Dread map) is that it supports accurate accounting of the realms’ economics (actual square-mileage, population, wealth, armies, etc). Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The next map style is the hybrid natural/topographic rendition with hex grid and stylized symbols, for use with small regions. Finally, we have Glorathon’s city map (drawn by yours truly), which shows the street layout and the position of building blocks. There are also maps for the skyships, but these aren’t geographic—more like detailed diagrams more akin to dungeon mapping. Perhaps another blog entry previewing these is in order very soon. All that being said, there’s still work to be done to complete the project. The cloth map is ready to go. I already received a “test print” and was very surprised by its quality. The fabric is tightly woven, soft, and very pleasant to the touch. The printing came out amazingly sharp—much more so than I anticipated. The Calidar bookmarks have already been ordered, and I’m waiting for delivery. The last few maps are being finalized for the book. The internal art, as I mentioned earlier fell behind schedule. The problem got bad enough that I reassigned the remainder of the b/w illustrations to another studio. This is the main source of the delay, which is likely to push the final release past mid-July. I’m now reaching a point where I can start thinking about the second book. Ideas are already accumulating in the back of my head. Then again, a trip to France is in the works, and V-Con is coming up in October. I plan to run two game sessions there, in addition to seminars. Both games will focus on skyships (big surprise!), though one will be written for Mystara and the other for Calidar, both using BECMI mechanics. I’m hoping to publish the Mystara adventure on this blog, like I did last year after I got back from Lucca Games. The other will either go the same route or find a way into a magazine’s pages. After this, the road is clear and I can start working on Episode Two and its kickstarter. Another mountain to climb!

Have you ever heard about the Talecember Art Challenge, or Worldbuilding? If you think that creating a character is difficult, imagine what a challenge it is to create a whole new universe! This challenge is on an entirely different level than the rest listed on this site. I do have to admit that when I’m …

Did you know that the shapes you use when drawing features on your fantasy maps can actually cause certain emotional triggers in the viewer? In this guest tutorial, Gerralt (DimensionDoor_Maps) will walk you through how you can use the power of shape language to give your maps more character!

According to Grant Snider, "genius" is: 1% inspiration, 29% perspiration, 5% improvisation, 8% aspiration, 7% contemplation, 15% exploration, 13% daily frustration, 11% imitation, 10.9% desperation, and 0.1% pure elation.

You know that collective sigh, the one that choruses around the room when you enthusiastically announce, "Class, the next unit we'll be entering into is poetry!" If poetry is taught the right way, students should be cheering at the thought of a Poetry Workshop day. Below I will outline the "why" of Poetry Workshop along with tips and tricks that I have picked up to make any poetry unit a raging success in your middle school classroom. If you like what you read below and want to implement a Poetry Workshop in your classroom, make sure you check out the Poetry Workshop resource available in my TpT store. This resource will walk you through every single step of implementing Poetry Workshop in your classroom, along with the assembly of a student Poetry Workshop binder that can be utilized across the entire school year. Lesson plans, graphic organizers, grading rubrics, and so much more awaits you in this comprehensive resource. Why Use Poetry Workshop? *It’s a change of pace. We immerse students so heavily into Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop day after day. It’s nice to have the option to mix things up a bit with Poetry Workshop. It is also a great transition between units. For instance, maybe you’ve just completed a three-week persuasive writing unit and you’re about to head into a round of literature circles. Take a day or two hiatus in between to do Poetry Workshop once the Poetry Workshop Kick-Off lessons are completed. Poetry Workshop can serve as a natural transition between the big, heavy units throughout the whole school year. *It will reach unexpected students. You may have a pretty good idea right away of who in your class excels at writing or can already read college-level material, but you may be surprised at which students soar while writing poetry. Poetry Workshop is a great way to hook in students who struggle or are unmotivated when it comes to reading and writing because it appears to be a manageable chunk. The thought of writing a five-paragraph essay or reading a 300-page book scares them half to death, but reading or writing a poem may not seem as scary. *It’s a great way to teach literary elements on a smaller scale. Sometimes it’s too daunting for students to come up with the theme of an entire book, but starting out teaching theme through poetry is the perfect scaffold before teaching theme in relation to a novel. The concept of theme will transfer perfectly between a poem and a book, but more students will understand the concept if you start teaching it through a poem all students understand and can easily read and reread. The same goes for teaching figurative language. Poetry is the perfect pathway to finding examples of figurative language and teaching them how to identify and use it. Point of view is also a great lens to look at poems through and teach students about through poetry. *It gets students to appreciate words and how words can evoke images. Poets have a gift for saying a lot with only a few words. It’s important that we’re teaching students how to be impactful writers in few words and make every word count. A poet keeps his/her audience in mind and thinks about what emotions he/she would like the reader to feel. Teaching-wise poetry allows so many pathways into teaching students about word choice, organization, sensory images, and audience awareness. *Poetry removes the need for perfect capitalization and punctuation. The poet gets to structure his/her poem how he/she wants to, and there is an art in playing around with punctuation and capitalization while writing a poem. Releasing this pressure of having to write “right” will allow students to write freely and openly. *A lot of times when we think about teaching poetry we think about having every student write a haiku, an “All About Me” poem, a name poem, a limerick, and then we call it good. Students publish a few poems, and we call it good for the year. This is not what Poetry Workshop is. Poetry Workshop gets students to read poems, analyze poems, consider techniques poets use that they would want to use, and write their own poems once they feel comfortable doing so. Teach students what poetry really is. As teachers, sometimes I think we’re afraid of poetry ourselves and then default into teaching poetry through a set of “form” poems. We hate it and are uncomfortable with it, so these views get passed right down to students. Let’s shift this attitude! Poetry can be a beautiful thing that teachers and students alike have a positive attitude about. Tips for Teaching with Poetry Workshop: Tip One: Teach Poetry in Phases I was first introduced to the idea of teaching poetry in phases when I read Fountas and Pinnell's book, Guiding Readers and Writers. Here's how I've taken the idea of phases and broken them down to work for my middle school students. Phase One: Collecting & Responding Have students read through poetry books or poetry websites, reading as many poems as they can. If they come upon a poem that they really enjoy or relate to, they can copy the poem down. I also like to have my students respond to the poems they write down in Phase One using prompts from the anchor chart below. Phase One exposes students to poetry in a non-threatening way. Students think about the poetry they enjoy. As they copy down poems, they also have to focus on how the poet structured the poem, what letters they capitalized, and how they punctuated it. Phase Two: Mimicking Techniques This is where it gets fun. Students now take techniques they've noticed other poets use and mimic these techniques to create poems of their own. Take a look at the anchor chart below to get an idea of the types of techniques students could mimic. Phase Three: Original Poetry Students can now create poetry of their own choosing. Give them the green light to let their creative spirits fly. Also discuss with them what they've learned from the first two phases that will help them as they create poetry. Check out the anchor chart below to see ideas for what makes a good poem. Tip Two: Whole Class Poetry Stalking I teach grammar in my classroom through pulling mentor sentences from our class interactive read aloud and have students "sentence stalk" the sentences by noticing everything the author did to construct that sentence. I transferred this concept into our poetry unit by having students notice everything they could about a particular poem as shown below. What has been great about poetry stalking is we have realized together words to use to describe poet's techniques. It has also been a great way to show that poetry has flexible rules for capitalization, punctuation, and poem structure. Not all poets construct their poems the same, but it's fun to infer why poets make the choices they do while writing poems. Check out this website for a great list of poems to use with middle school students while sentence stalking. Tip Three: Use Poetry Interactive Read Alouds There are so many great books out there written in verse. As you kick-off Poetry Workshop for the year with a poetry unit, consider doing a read aloud with one of the amazing book choices below to complement the work students are doing in Poetry Workshop. Tip Four: Teach New Types of Poetry Mix is up with your students by showing them poems different types of poems. Three of my favorites are below. Book Spine Poems: Give book boxes from your classroom library to students and have them create a book spine poem of their own. Blackout Poems: Copy off pages from several different books and make photocopies, allow students to select one, and then have them black out the words they don't want leaving the words they'd like to use to create a poem. Sandwich Poems: Students take the first and the last line from a poem they copied down during Collecting & Responding and write a poem filling in the middle. Tip Five: Make Everyone a Poet Show your students that everyone is and can be a poet, even you. Model the work you complete alongside your students during Poetry Workshop. Also, make sure you give plenty of time to have students share what they're doing in Poetry Workshop with one another.

This summer, I read a great book about anchor charts. I make tons of anchor charts with my students each year, but there are times when I f...

The Long Read: They may have been disproved by science or dismissed as ridiculous, but some foolish beliefs endure. In theory they should wither away – but it’s not that simple

Each school year a unique mix of middle school students enter the doors of my classroom. Each with a story, each with different strengths, each with different weaknesses. I never take this responsibility lightly because what this means for me, as their teacher, is that I don't get to take the already published book off the shelf and write the same story as I did last year. Instead, we create and co-author a new story together. A story that I could never dream up or predict until it happens the way that it needs to happen. After all, doesn't every new class that enters your classroom door deserve a story of their very own? Because of this, the walls of my classroom to begin the year aside from staples I keep up each year, begin as a blank canvas. The anchor charts that fill my room happen naturally, as our story is being created, new anchor charts are being created to match the learning that is happening in the classroom. When students need to be reminded of a concept we have covered or an expectation that is expected of them, they can refer to the anchor charts on our walls and be brought back to that moment in our journey. Anchor charts help with retention of material, they help with developing student independence, and they also help to anchor routines and expectations. Below is the story of our learning so far this school year. "Before you turn in any piece of writing, ask yourself..." This anchor chart is designed to help students self-assess their writing and be that self-talk that many of them need. Teaching students to be reflective is one of the hardest yet most beneficial skills we can teach as teachers. This anchor chart is a great reminder for my students and for myself. The best thing about it? My co-teacher who teaches the same group of our students math and science is on board with holding students to these same writing expectations with this same language. During our weekly sentence stalking, students can use this anchor chart to gather ideas of different items to notice so that they're not always noticing the same types of things. These are the symbols I use when editing student writing and also the symbols I want them to use when they self-edit and edit their peers' writing. This anchor chart is a helpful, quick reminder of the editing symbols. I LOVE this anchor chart for middle school students. During the first few weeks of school, we referred to it often to self-assess how we did as a class and as an individual with following the expectations in order to make independent reading and writing time productive. If we have a rough day with following expectations, I come right back to this anchor chart and reinforce the positive behaviors students ARE exhibiting. Our current interactive read aloud is Killing Mr. Griffin, and it's written in 3rd person omniscient. Students are loving the almost spooky way the narrator of the story seems to know EVERYTHING. We had an awesome discussion about point of view through that and now students are actively identifying the point of view in their independent reading books. Reading is thinking, and one of the strategic reading actions to show that thinking is by summarizing. I like to start the year with a few minilessons on summarizing because it seems to be a building block for the other reading minilessons. These are some of the criteria we set for what summaries should include and not include. Writers use transitions for a variety of purposes. Crafting transitions smoothly into writing improves sentence fluency and help make ideas clear. This anchor chart will be a great reminder to aid students in doing this in their writing all school year.