Ying Chang Compestine | Diana Cruchley

Emperor Ming Da is only nine years old, but he knows his minsters are corrupt. To obtain the money to help his people he convinces his ministers that burlap bags are really magic New Year’s clothes. Honest people will see splendour and the dishonest will see burlap sacks. Fooled, they claim to see the perfection of the clothes, until in the New Year’s parade a boy calls out that they are wearing burlap sacks.

Comparison
The story is an obvious variation on The Emperor’s New Clothes as written by Hans Christian Anderson. Read that story to the class, asking them to note as many similarities as they can think of to The Chinese Emperor’s New Clothes. Tell them you are going to introduce them to the SECRET for writing a “good enough” comparison every time.

List 3-5 ways they are similar.
List 3 ways they are different.
Start with a basic introduction, “The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson and The Chinese Emperor’s New Clothes by Compestine are variations on the same story…”
Write your 3-5 ways they are the same. Start with your best example, end with your second best example, put the others between.
Start with However, the two stories have quite a few differences. Then explain your 3 differences, starting with the strongest, ending with your second strongest, with the other(s) in between.
Write a conclusion; perhaps your opinion of which is the better version and why.
Re-write your first sentence to be more interesting. “Without Hans Christian Anderson’s original Emperor’s New Clothes there would have been no version set in China.

The Author
Compestine has had a diverse career including being a food advisor for Martha Stewart. She has also written many children’s books including: The Story of Chopsticks, The Story of Kites, The Story of Noodles, The Runaway Wok, The Runaway Rice Cake, and many more. You can visit the her website here or listen to her life story in this keynote lecture below.

For more creative writing ideas, click on The Chinese Emperor’s New Clothes to download.

The fisherman in this story is fooled by his three nephews. They persuade him that they will make stone soup, then distract him at each point, in order to add real ingredients to the soup. He is

The Chopsticks Game

Our fisherman makes bowls and chopsticks from bamboo. It might be fun to gather a class set of chopsticks. Some students will be accomplished users, and others will never have held them.

Buy about 90 pieces of butterfly pasta. Make 60 pieces of 4 cm x 4 cm coloured cardstock. Each student gets one pair of chopsticks, 1 pair of yardstick pieces, and 6 pieces of butterfly pasta. (Put the cardstock and butterfly pieces in individual ziplock bags for ease of distribution.)

Ask students put their pasta on one of the pieces of cardstock. They are then to transfer each butterfly pasta to the other piece, using their chopsticks. When they are accomplished at the transfer, you could allow them to play with them during recess to have chopstick races.

I think that chopsticks may have “created” Chinese cuisine. That is, Chinese dishes are cooked in sauces with small bites, easy to pick up with chopsticks. Western cuisine on the other hand is eaten with a knife and fork because it is cooked before cutting it up. The Chinese tended to think that all the “butchering” (that is cutting it up) should happen before the food is served.

Extreme Writing Topics

Always present three possible topics for extreme writing so that students will have a choice. My book, The Power of Extreme Writing, is available at ASCD for a complete explanation of this unique approach to journaling.

Food I prepare myself
Stories of playing a trick on someone, or having a trick played on me.
Stories of working hard, and stories of being lazy (doing a whole lot of nothing

Stone Soup and Creative Mornings

Creative Mornings meets once a month and is an organization that is free to attend and belong to. Speakers also speak for free to an audience of about 200 “creatives”—writers, artists, software developers, advertising pr people, photographers, actors, etc.

Creative Mornings Stone Soup is made to demonstrate the values of community and sharing using the story of Stone Soup. Each of their speakers over the last year or so, has one line from the story, and the effect is really terrific. You could think of doing something like that with your students.

For 6 creative writing ideas, click The Real Story of Stone Soup to download.