High School Writing Group 2025

 

Something new we did this year was a High School Writing Group with Malachi, Daisy, and me. We read a bunch of articles and essays, and took turns giving writing assignments and then reading and talking about our work. It was really wonderful. I loved seeing what the kids wrote, and getting a chance to practice my own writing too!

I need to ask Daisy for some of her essays and poems (she had some great ones), but I happen to have a couple of Malachi's essays saved in my files, so I will post them here for posterity:

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Mike Machete

by Malachi Nielson

His name was Mike Machete, although that’s not what his friends call him. Not to his face anyway. 

He first approached me in that particular way that makes one wish to… escape notice. I didn’t want to flee in terror or scream for help or anything like that, just to briefly become irrelevant to the mountain of muscles and sweat walking toward me. He was likely in his sixties, with a few graying hairs on his mostly shaved head, though his age made his build more disconcerting not less. In each hand he held a 70 pound dumbbell which I can only guess he’d been doing lateral shoulder raises with. 

I’m used to the way adults look down on teenagers in the gym, as if it’s insulting to have such small humans with such weak muscles even in the presence of adult body builders, but usually that only means we’re ignored when we’re waiting for a machine, or we’re scoffed at when we enter. Mike Machete, however, wanted to confront me directly.

“Gym’s busy today,” he noted, eyeing me and Luke, (and the exercise machine we had the impudence to occupy.)

I affirmed the point weakly, with a nervous giggle.

“People keep stealing my station every time I walk away,” he told us, and something about his inflection warned me against questioning this information’s relevance to me and Luke.

I gave him another giggle of agreement, signaling he’d persuaded me on this too. 

“I figured I’d just do the workout with dumbbells instead,” he said, perhaps to justify the weights in his hands. As if he needed any justification.

Then, I followed his gaze to his “station,” the bench press at the corner of the room. It was still loaded with the meager 40 pounds Luke and I had been lifting before our migration to our current position, where we’d been intercepted by Mike Machete. I felt a spear of nervousness, and I would have given anything in that moment to dispose of the evidence that we’d been the ones who were last using the bench.

To my relief, he left us then, to return to his station. I call it his, because if you don’t use the entire station you’re clearly only borrowing it. Mike Machete, however, didn’t let a single available weight go to waste. 

We ran into him again on our way out, and he seemed impressed with us. “I’m so tired of all the high schoolers that come here and don’t even work out,” he said. It is the greatest measure of my gym success that he didn’t include me and Luke in that category.  

He introduced himself then. I accepted his handshake, and his hand enclosed mine completely, in the way a blood pressure machine encloses the bicep, and whether his hand was scarred, from the countless knife fights he’d survived with his bare hands, or merely calloused from daily workouts, I’ll never know. 

“My friends just call me Mike,” he told us, in that particular way that implied that we would too, (at least to his face) and he hoped he wouldn’t ever be forced to instruct us otherwise. 

Since then, we haven’t been ignored when we’re waiting for machines, and nobody ever scoffs when we enter Mike’s Gym.

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The Window

by Malachi Nielson

My first mistake was opening the window. I wasn’t paying much attention to the drive through at this point, but I’d seen the next car driving forward so I opened the window assuming it would arrive momentarily. It did not. The car in front of it didn’t leave quite enough space for the next car to line their window up with mine. But you must understand, once the drive through window is open, it seems beyond rude to close it and ignore the customer. 

“Hi, how are you?” I asked, hanging my head out the window, looking in the direction of a bald man’s open window at least six feet away from me.

“Doing well,” came his distant reply. 

We looked at each other across the distance between us. It wouldn’t have been a vast distance were either of us in a position to move closer, but as it was it might as well have been the Atlantic Ocean. 

Surely the car in front of him will soon move, I thought. I began to read back his order, slowly, to give time for the drive through to move and bring the man into more natural proximity. 

“You got… uh… one cheeseburger?” 

“That’s right.”

“And there weren’t any fries or drinks on that order.” 

“None.”

“Oh good, because I don’t have any here. I mean I could add them of course, but—” 

“That’s all right, thank you.”

We eyed each other. This was the awkward part of the conversation. He was holding his credit card, and the car blocking his way didn’t seem any closer to moving. I ran some mental calculations. I wouldn’t be able to reach it. On the other hand, there’s only so much awkward silence a person can bear. 

“I think I can reach,” I said.

The man’s eyes widened —whether in admiration or fear I could not tell. Wordlessly he stretched his hand out as far as he could. I leaned out of the window, but alas there was still a space between us. And so I was forced to wriggle forward hanging with one hand on the window while I stuck my entire torso out, until I felt his credit card in my hand. 

Triumph washed over me, as I wriggled back through the window to charge him for his order. The glory of success made the return journey easier, and when the man once again held his card, we were both beaming. We’d done the impossible. It was as if we had bridged the great divide between man and God. And then I heard a sound. 

I looked back to the card reader, to see it had printed a receipt. 

“Do you want your receipt?” I asked. 

“Yes, please.” He said. And the journey began again.

Writing our own books

We learned a lot about bookmaking—both the physical process of it, binding and papermaking and pop-up books and signatures and folios and so forth—but also the process of writing and publishing a book; the different types of publishing and what steps a story goes through for editing, proofreading, graphic design, etc. before it's published. I had the children each plan and design a book or write a story to be "published"! It was a lot of fun. I was amazed at the things they came up with! I wanted to wait to publish this till Daisy had hers done, but she keeps forgetting to do the last things for it, so I'll have to update with hers in another post. She's taking longer than the others because she's writing a longer chapter book plus a cute shorter children's book!

Junie used my book formatting software, Vellum, to design and format her book. It's called "Yankee Doodle the Spy" and it's so cute. I love how it turned out. We had it printed and bound at Office Max.

Her favorite page was the "About the Author" page!

It was also fun because they did the wrong binding on her book, so then they reprinted it and did the correct binding and she got to have two copies!

Goldie's book was incredible. I'm still in awe because I've never seen anything like it before and I don't know HOW she came up with the idea! It's a story hidden inside a sort of playhouse. Here's the outside of it. She covered cardboard with wrapping paper and used a ribbon to lace it shut.

The spine

The back of the book, with instructions on how to read it

And here's how it looks when you open it up—a forest scene, and a little woodcutter's hut with furniture. (This all goes along with the story, of course.)

Inside the hut, the parts of the story are numbered on little sheets of paper, rolled up, and hidden inside the objects. So you can see the book on the stool has a #1 on it.

You open it up and find the first part of the story. Under that "once upon a time" page the book is actually a little box, and you can kind of see the tiny folded paper within the box. That's the story's first paragraph.

You can see the rolled up paper under this chair

And one hidden here in the picture frame and so forth.

There's even a tiny cake that sits on the table!

And the "copyright" mark is on some smoke coming out of the chimney! :) This is the cutest book ever. I love it so much!

Teddy wanted to make a nonfiction book with pictures in it from some of our trips. He made the cover and we laminated all the pages. Then we got it spiral-bound.

He chose his favorite pictures to print and arrange on the pages.

And added some of his own labeling :)

Such a good little author and a fun project.

I saved the most impressive for last. I didn't tell Malachi he had to write a book for this unit, because he's always writing and had already finished about 3 other books or novellas on his own. I did tell him he should work on formatting one of those books with the Vellum software, and maybe someday he could upload it to Amazon and print out some hard copies for himself. But I didn't really follow up or think that was urgent, just something he could do sometime.

Then, about a week after Mother's Day, I woke up to find a 300-page hardback book on my nightstand with a bow on it. It was by "Malachi Norris" (he's already decided that's his pen name…his first and middle) and I had never seen it before! And it was dedicated to me! I started crying as I read his sweet, funny, witty dedication page. It turns out he'd been working on this book for four months secretly, typing away at it when I thought he was doing other school work (which he also managed to keep up on, somehow!) and he'd enlisted Daisy's help with editing and Sam to draw the cover. Then he'd formatted it, uploaded it to a Barnes and Noble self-publishing platform, and ordered a copy—all without me having any idea what he was doing! I was completely amazed.

I was so excited to read it, and it didn't disappoint. It's a mystery story set in a cool fantasy world, and I was completely enthralled. I knew Malachi was a good writer, but I was still surprised at how I was able to absorb myself in his story and enjoy it so completely. I have a feeling Ky is going to be a great author someday! He's working on the sequel to this story now, and I can't wait!

Hooray for books and hooray for my little authors!

Book Unit and Lettering Samples

Click to enlarge!

I wanted to do a Books and Authors unit for Malachi's sake this year, because he's been so into writing lately (see here! and that isn't even his first novel—it's about his fourth. He is getting really good!) and it seemed like a fun "spine" into which many different areas could be connected! It turned out really interesting and fun. 

We started with an overview of the history of writing, then moved into paper making, bookmaking, bookbinding, printing, the printing press, libraries, etc.

Then we moved on to types of writing and story, and ended with an overview of a bunch of different genres, reading representative stories and, at night, watching a typical movie from each genre. So much fun!! I had Malachi teach us a class on story structure and it was amazing. He is a wonderful teacher! He made it so interesting and accessible. It made me resolve to have him teach more often!

Clementine loves to come sit on Malachi's lap while he's writing. He says, "Do you want to be my little helper?" and she happily snuggles in with him and pushes buttons and points at things and asks questions and just generally makes herself "useful." Ha! So cute.

We've been gradually adding built-in shelves to this room since we moved in, and it was fun that during this unit this whole wall got completed. We call this room the Library and now it really feels like one!

I asked my dear friend (and writing partner) Rachael to do a lesson for us over FaceTime as our Guest Author. It was so good! She's the best. She's written three amazing books about her ancestors, as well as our book, of course!

We did an activity where we learned about fonts and fancy lettering styles, and then tried to learn/copy some of them ourselves. The girls loved this! Marigold, especially, loves fancy calligraphy. I loved what she came up with!

Look at the tiny little bunnies dancing around that "Eve"!

Junie's beautiful lettering

Junie's Pig Alphabet (Pigphabet?)

Daisy worked a long time to get the letters in her name exactly right! They look beautiful!

Making and using papyrus

One thing I remember pretty clearly from my grade-school years is the time I made my own "papyrus" for a school project. I don't remember it all THAT clearly, I guess, but I do remember that I used iris leaves, and it took a lot of experimentation to get them soft enough—seems like maybe I ended up using the blender? And then baking the sheets in the oven?—and it never really turned into great paper. But it was fun, I remember that! For this unit, though, I wasn't really planning on trying to make paper because we had done it recently when learning about Japan.

But…while we were gathering the reeds for our reed boats, we found some of these nice wide-leaved water plants which seemed like they might be kind of like papyrus…because they had white pulpy stuff inside, and seemed buoyant. So, we decided just to experiment a bit.

With real papyrus, you'd scoop out the pulp and just use that for your paper, I think. But we just wove the whole reeds into a kind of mat and then pounded it with a mallet. Seb quite enjoyed that part.

It got all pulpy and you could see the fibers sort of fuse together as it dried.

And once it was fully dry, it was possible to write on our "papyrus"…though not really easy. Still, it was fun to visualize the process a little better by doing this activity.

I also ordered some actual papyrus so the children could see and feel what it was like. Much nicer than our "homemade" version, of course! And it was fun to write on it with brushes. We attempted to write our names using hieroglyphs, though the more we learned about that written language, the more we realized how complicated it was and how we didn't really "get" it with our letter-for-letter Western view of things! Still…fun to try it.

Here's an overview of the Egyptian numbering system we used, too.

Japanese calligraphy

Once our handmade paper was dry and ready to use, we got out ink and brushes and tried to write on it. I don't know if that can be called true "calligraphy." We don't know at all what we're doing, obviously, but some of our books showed us the proper order of strokes to write kanji characters, and we looked others up online. There are sites like this that will show you a character with an animation to show the stroke order.

Mostly, though, we just wanted to get a feel for the technique of using a brush to write with, and see if we could get characters to look good on our handmade paper.

Japanese is a really hard language to learn, we read, because of the three alphabets and the huge number of kanji in use, but we all learned to count to 10, and we liked this site that explained how some kanji characters came to be. We also watched this Begin Japanology episode about one of the alphabets, hiragana. Really interesting. (I thought this article about gendered speech was interesting too.)

I thought writing the numbers was quite fun. They are much simpler than some of the other characters! :) And I love the thick-thin strokes you get when you're using a brush.