Spoofing History

To exemplify fun ways to incorporate creative writing skills, history and literature, I recently posted two of my daughter's summarized recaps of chapters we've read in Story Of The World.

As a reminder, we use Susan Wise Bauer's Story Of The World, which is a fun resource that succinctly summarizes some highlights from history (books are published by time period/age).  The information is just enough to glimpse, satisfy the pallet and oftentimes ignite curiosity to dig further into some specific event, person or time period.   The brief but well-presented information has often ignited further investigation into a particular area, according to individual interest.   It's a great tool to light the spark of self-directed learning, which is the whole idea :)

Anyway, I usually encourage writing a summary after each chapter read because writing it helps to 1 - reinforce understanding of information; when we retell it, we have to organize the information in our mind in order to present it, and  2 - Offers practice in creative writing, organization and story telling.  

My especially creatively inclined daughter has been doing, is writing a "Spoof" version of the summary, adding humorous twists to the story.  J's "Historical Spoof's" have become a hit in our house because while they are not exactly accurate, they are often hilarious.

I offered a couple of examples because it's really a great way to practice not only the reinforcement of the information (even if the retelling is twisted,  the idea has to be retained in order to twist it and spin it into a spoof), but this totally unrestricted practice in creative writing really exercises the creative imagination in a way that also offers a ground idea on which to focus.  It's free-range with an objective. 

We have a collection of these Spoofs and I'm publishing several of them here under the label "Spoofing History".   While these do not really contain accurate data, they are all based on historical events, then twisted with humor (sometimes dark humor) and delivered via the skill of tale-telling.

Enjoy Spoofing History and do share if you decide to try it with your family :)