MINNESOTA CHILDREN'S PRESS
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Books By Kids!

Minnesota Children's Press delivers in Grand Marais, Minnesota! Our Story Scouts publishing club members (L to R) Leah, Tib and Ari proudly display their latest book they co-wrote and co-illustrated, "Safe + Happy: A Children's Field Guide to Thriving In A Pandemic" www.safeandhappy.org. Photo credit: Gwen Danfelt

 LAUGH LOCAL in 2023!
LEARN EMPATHY THROUGH INSULTS

Author-illustrator Kip Hathaway & friends performed Shakespearean insult-themed improv, OCT. 15, 2022 at TWIN CITIES' BOOK FESTIVAL, Minnesota State Fair Grounds!
BUY OUR NEWEST BOOK, "Kip's Illustrated Guide To Shakespearean Insults" now in Grand Marais stores, and available through  Minneapolis-based Artmobile online book store.

Click link above, or cover photo below to purchase.

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Listen along as kids in Grand Marais trade barbs with the bard and read Shakespearean insults aloud!


​MISSION: MENTOR FOR IMPACT


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​W
e mentor children ages  5-15 in rural and  underserved Minnesota in writing, illustration  and publishing  books to create inclusive community in which children’s perspectives enrich and enlarge the public imagination about how to create a generative future for all.
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Our book "Ice Cream & Fish" won a Top 3 award in the 2021 Minnesota Author Project! www.icecreamandfish.org
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​Children inherit the world – but are left out of the conversations that shape it.

Our mission at Minnesota Children's Press is to change that. Story Scouts power the vision and the reality.
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COOKING AT THE CO-OP!
Click the video play button on the cartoon below to watch 3 minutes of delicious!

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EXPLORE, OBSERVE, CREATE

Seeing a bear in an apple  tree while on a walk  in Grand Marais is believing–and inspiring! It makes Story Scouts and their mentors who are professional artists, writers, editors and designers think of...picture books about  bears! And the  things bears might do in their bearly days with their bearly  friends. Share apples and  tea and a story, of course. Illustration credit: Lexi  Ames © 2020 Minnesota Children's Press. All Rights Reserved.
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VIRUS TRAPS

Vaccinated and masked 1st grade Story Scouts over the holiday break prepared for safe return of in-person school in January 2022   by making do-it-yourself (DIY) air filtration boxes that can trap viruses, using only:
  • a box fan
  •  four MERV 13 air filters
  • cardboard
  • duct tape --- LOTS of it!!  Colors, please! 

We call these air filter boxes Virus Traps.

Adults call  them Corsi-Rosenthal Air Filtration Boxes, named after the engineers and scientists who designed and tested them. Read about this easy, cheap (about $75 for materials) effective way to reduce infecting others  with airborne omicron viral variant   here and watch instructional videos here.

STORY  SCOUTS' VIRUS  TRAP

1. DRAW a building plan. That way you understand the basic idea: A box fan mounted on the top of  a filter cube sucks indoor air into filters. Filters trap the viruses. The cleaned air is sucked out by the fan out of the filter cube -- safe and happy air! This reduces the number of infectious virus particles in the air, and makes being together indoors safer.​
2. TAPE four MERV 13 filters together with duct tape to make a cube. Make sure  all the arrows on the filters point IN to the center of the cube you are building.
3. CUT
 a square of cardboard and tape it to the bottom. ​
4. HAIR TEST a box fan placed on cube to get the blowing-air direction right. Use the hair test. Turn on  the fan and  position it so it  blows your  hair around. That proves the fan is moving filtered air  OUT   of  the cube and putting  virus-free air back in the  room! 
5. TAPE the box fan to the top of the cube.
6. DONE! Celebrate your excellent safety device and share the  news with others. Teach them to make a Virus Trap!
7.  CARTOON your success! On  your original build plan ADD screaming virus dialogue boxes as they are about to get trapped by your filter box, including a mad sassy virus daring you  to trap it! 
Our newest Story Scouts children's publishing club book!
Click the cover photo below for free download PDF of its standards-aligned curriculum for learning activities in the book, written with nationally recognized, award-winning instructional designers!
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Click the photo to buy our latest books!
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Entrepreneurial writing samples: We designed and made these printed paper placemats so visitors to the North Shore can write love letters to Lake Superior. We plan to collect them into a book.


We prepare rural children for success in 21st century work based on digital media literacy and collaborative, creative communication and next-generation technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). How? By helping them create career-relevant portfolios, develop admirable work ethics and apply outstanding problem-solving skills and attitudes by the time they enter high school.

During and after the coronavirus age, all careers will require mastery of remote working skills. Call it the Zoom Boom. We agree with leading thinkers and economists – read Professor Robert Reich's BerkleyBlog –  who believe the Pandemic will reshape the future of work into four job categories: the remotes, the essentials, the unpaid and the forgotten.

Minnesota Children's Press  kids excel in the first two categories. 

Innovation rehab.  Here's the trend (below) we seek to reverse: the Innovation deficit in our 7 county region we live in known as the Arrowhead Region. Our area is well-served by  high-quality broadband internet (See "Connection") which often is  cited as the key factor needed to foster a robust  innovation culture. But our innovation score is less than  half the Connection score.

We are changing that. Our Story Scouts are innovation-centric, eagerly  learning atmospheric chemistry to improve the quality of indoor air, mapping litter flows and analyzing spatial data with ArcGIS software, collecting field data on microplastics in Lake Superior.

This is the work, our work–and the promise–of children educated to thrive in the 21st-century. 
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FOCUS ON JOY! Butterfly Birthday Parties

MORE JOY! Reading Aloud to Elders

Listen to the joy a reader feels from reading Nancy Nelson's February 2020 book, Joy! Finding Joy Every Day. In the gallery, see Nancy's evocative cover photographs and the moving preface she wrote as she faced pancreatic cancer with courage and creativity.

Working with Minnesota Children's Press made it easy for Nancy to involve her middleschool granddaughter, Sylvie, in a multigenerational artistic family history project. Sylvie drew the soaring hopeful birds that we incorporated into the book design to become end papers of winged joy!
Your tax-free donation honors Nancy's spirit of joyful embrace of life, and all roads on the journey. We thank you for supporting the spirit of creative resiliency Nancy embodies with a gift copy of her book.

CHILD
​MENTAL HEALTH

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MCP Mentor Kip is a hands-on guy. You'll learn a lot from him, especially about illustrating with stick figures. And coping. And cows. While studying acting at Ireland's National Theatre School, The Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, Kip never forgot his Minnesota roots and love of the land, its creatures and beverages. He visited the Irish countryside, farms and cows whenever possible, stopping for a nip of milk now and then.
FREE & FUN!
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Receive 1 gift copy of Kip's Illustrated Guide to Shakespearean Insults, 2nd Edition, 
as our thanks for your tax-free donation to Minnesota Children's Press.
New! Our expanded, 2nd edition with empathy curriculum is now available, as of  January 4, 2023!  

Click here to buy  Kip's Illustrated Guide to Shakespearean Insults by Kip Hathaway, Minnesota Children's Press (MCP) illustration and story mentor, actor, improv professional, comic and stick figure artist.

It's the first in our children's mental health series on
 creative resilience  to help kids cope with the uncertainties caused by:

  • the covid-19 pandemic
  • school stresses
  • being misunderstood
  • the unobstructed view of a future full of vibrating question marks

Looking back at his early self, Kip,  now 28, shares the wobbles he's known and illustrated in his middle school and high school notebooks. In his Dear Reader preface to Kip's Illustrated Shakespearean Insults Kip explains how he drew his way out of some depressing days. His spirit-stick figure Bob even showed up in Kip's college application in an essay about the most influential people in his life.

​Kip invites your questions.

Write and draw to Kip about your experiences, or send questions  to: kip@minnchildpress.org.
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In Ireland, at The Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, Kip was cast as a cat and took the role seriously. He takes your questions seriously, too.

BOOK BIRTHDAY PARTIES
Still VIRTUAL FOR Spring 2022

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Bookcrafting birthday parties are conducted as hybrids through Spring 2021. That means Minnesota Children's Press will send supplies to your home, and then coordinate the fun online through a bookmaking buffet, including choreographing a Story Walk to develop plot, characters, conflict and resoultion.

Physical supplies include character-crafting materials and bookmaking kits  for child authors and illustrators. Online, we manage book creation in a Zoom 2-hour writeshop overseen by a bookmaking story mentor from Minnesota Children's Press. When the Covid-19 virus is fully controlled and it is safe to socially interact, we will resume in-person book buffet bookmaking parties. Questions? Contact Anne.

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HEARING CHILDREN

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TOP Anne works with a young author – the motivating joy behind Minnesota Children's Press. She's been teaching kids in grades kindergarten-10 how to write, illustrate and publish their own newspapers, books, and magazines since 2006.
BELOW Minnesota Children's Press specializes in amplifying the voices of children in rural communities, and staffed a booth at the Goodhue County Fair, in  Zumbrota, for  four days in August 2019. Credits: Top photo by Joey McLeister for The Story Laboratory, LLC and bottom photo by Anne Brataas. Copyright@2016-2020. All Rights Reserved.
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  CREATING WITH CHILDREN

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Howdy! I'm Anne! Some of you may know me as the woman who makes Fairy Gardens and Fairy Libraries in summer, and in the fall, gives out books  – and candy – for Halloween.

​Minnesota Children's Press is my new educational non-profit authoring and publishing collaborative. It's a mobile, mentored publishing lab for Minnesota child authors, illustrators, designers, and editors in kindergarten-grade 10, or thereabouts.

We are Story Scouts. We interview, research, write, illustrate, edit, design, craft, proof, sign off, and publish stories from a child's eye view to offer a fresh, clear, truthful perspective on the world around us.

We practice early childhood philanthropy through our Youth In Philanthropic Publishing (YIPP) Advisory Board. By selling books that Story Scouts make and sell, we raise money for community improvements. Selling our books helps fund life-improving projects such as helping kids graduate from college free of debt.  Or designing more engaging playgrounds of natural, non-polluting and non-toxic materials. Or helping our kids' log-rolling team excel by raising funds to buy a new $800 cover for its practice logs. From our Ice Cream & Fish revenues through March 2021, we donated to the Violence Prevention Center, several 12-steps groups, and funds for families facing food insecurity.

Writing, illustrating and publishing books together—and the many 21st Century digital work and entrepreneurial skills learned doing this—highlights how capable, creative and caring kids really are. We aim  to make our community stronger, more inclusive and more prepared to create and practice a sustainable future with a vibrant culture of meaningful work (likely remote); thriving families; healthy water, forests, air and land. We want to be the best stewards we can be of our  harmonious home on the north shore of Lake Superior.

Join us to make a Minnesota Children's Press book, newspaper, 'zine, web site, graphic novel, illustrated timeline, public service announcement, informational graphic or other words 'n pictures project today!

And when winter snows blanket Fairy Gardens and  Fairy Libraries, and my books have all been given out at Halloween, I read aloud to babies, outside, in the falling snow!
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MCP Founder and author Anne Brataas reads aloud to children wherever, whenever she can.

HOW IT WORKS: 2022

Minnesota Children's Press brings mentored, mobile publishing labs to your school, interest group, club, 4H meet-ups or county fair. During 2021 COVID-19 precautions, we make the publishing magic happen remotely: virtually, online, through distance mentoring and publishing.

If you don't have a group, join our Story Scouts Club. You can read about one in Grand Marais, Minnesota, USA: www.storyscouts.org. These kids wanted to write about global health to help raise money to improve children's health in Africa.

​What's your topic?

Love history? Join our Digital Rural History Project! Help us research, interview, write and illustrate multigenerational stories of community in rural Minnesota.

During our Outdoor Book Camp, generously funded in part by the Lloyd K. Johnson Foundation, kids on Minnesota's North Shore published "A Children's History of Grand Marais, Minnesota: Ice Cream & Fish" in 2020, www.icecreamandfish.org. We expect a second printing this summer to meet demand!

Our dream: To collect child-authored and -illustrated histories from around rural Minnesota to create a child-eye's-view anthology of life in our state. Learn conversational and interview skills, like these Grand Marais Story Scouts in the video interviewing Ron about what his Grand Marais high school days were like 65 years ago. Then watch our writers craft their story and ponder fonts as they develop their entrepreneurial writing instincts.

When you start a project with us, our professional, award-winning writers, editors, and publishers help you tell your stories with style and clarity, and in the process, help you "skill up" for 21st century communication challenges by teaching entrepreneurial writing, illustration, editing, publishing, web design, and related career skills.

We finalize the files of your project with you, then print whenever possible with local printers in your area. If there aren't any, we print in Minnesota—occasionally in upstate New York—but always in the United States to ensure our books are non-toxic.
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Sharks & Rocks. Watch this 20-second video to see how a hole in a rock inspires a story involving a cookie-cutter shark.

ORIGINAL VOICES 

Our focus is on you creating. You are original thinkers and doers, a sound not heard before in the Universe, and vital to the song of life. We start with you telling us the stories you feel all around you, like this one, about how a rock got a hole in it:

Our priority service area is rural Minnesota, or national and international partner children's organizations who live outside of major cities or urban areas. If you have stories to tell, reach out now and contact me: anneATminnchildpress.org

Why Join? To Help Create Publications Like These!

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Original cartoon of the "Cig Shark" is by ©Jordan, 2016, Grand Portage, Minnesota. Our mentors digitized Jordan's "Cig Shark" character to be the "Spokes Shark" for our successful public service campaign about the dangers of smoking and vaping. In 2019, BorealCorps www.borealcorps.org became Story Scouts, www.storyscouts.org. Click the Cig Shark chart above to go to our BorealCorps web site–see our success! State law changed to help keep vaping out of high schools and protect young kids from peer-pressure exposure to it.
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Castle cover ©Aaron, 9, for a class-written text about their medieval history studies.

TEXT BOOKS  DIY and show what you know

DARK TIMES TRIBUNE
Creative teachers can assign the publishing of a class-authored and illustrated text book to serve as a summative learning assessment for a topic they studied. Forget tests and reports. Book crafting is a far more demanding, rewarding, and instructive interdisciplinary project. Fourth-graders in St. Paul's Capitol Hill Magnet School learned this with their unit on Medieval Life and their creation of Dark Times Tribune. They supplemented class lessons with research.
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We have worked with children for 10 years to write and publish children's newspapers. Click image to see the archives of our Children's Newseum of child-authored newspapers.

NEWSPAPERS  Create your positive community

 AEROBIC NEWSPAPERS
Newspapers written and illustrated by children—who walk to do their reporting, making it an aerobic newspaper—bring fresh voices and visions to community dialogue that connect, enrich, and delight. Newspapers are a foundation of our free American society because they encourage civil discussions that lead to productive, problem solving.
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My First Farm, book, ©Julia, 8. She drew the dog and chicken on our logo, too.

BOOKS Tell your story, your way, your genre

MY FIRST FARM & ​JACK'S STORY
The youngest Story Scouts create with paper and pencil, as 8-year-old author-illustrator Julia from Rochester does above in her book, My First Farm. Older Story Scouts, such as Sammie, 13, from Grand Marais, are fully digital in research, writing, and web book. Her story is historical fiction about the life of Jack, a Depression-era orphan. Sammie has been the editor of BorealCorps.org, Cook County's children's newspaper, since 6th grade.
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Still not sure what you might do in a Minnesota Children's Press Story Scouts Publishing Club? Click on the triangle below to watch a 3-minute video visual explanation.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS OFFICE

We agree that sharing is caring! And we do, in fact, want to share and circulate our work – and also give credit where credit is due to honor intellectual property rights worldwide. You can contact us below to get permission to use our work:

email

rights@minnchildpress.org

​

address

Minnesota Children's Press
P.O. Box 301
Grand Marais, Minnesota 55604
U.S.A.



 Questions? Please call, email, or write us a paper letter. We have hardly any social media; it's bad for your imagination and sense of self.

The occasional  Instagram is as far as we go. Even that is iffy. Check out the compelling 2021 FaceBook (now called Meta) Whistleblower Frances Haugen testimony before Congress about FB's  "moral bankruptcy"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/05/frances-haugen-whistleblower-moral-bankruptcy-facebook. Read or listen to the early revelations in the Wall Street Journal's investigative series, Facebook Files here https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039

Drop social media. Go outside.

Or, join our Pencil & Punctuation Club and learn how to make writing implements and use semicolons and be a good person communicating  kindly and effectively through paper  letters.

NEW in 2023! Our outdoor Letteracy Deck has been generously funded by the Blandin Foundation of Grand Rapids, Minnesota! It opens in June 2023 as a screen-free and free mentored public space for civil correspondence.

Write to: Minnesota Children's Press
P.O. Box 301
Grand Marais, Minnesota USA 55604

©Minnesota Children's Press 2019-2023. All Rights Reserved.


Hours

M-F: All of 'em

Telephone

+1 218-ThreeEightSeven_FIVEsixSIXsix

Email

anneATminnchildpressDOTorg
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