So I spent a week with 15 middle schoolers and I learned
some helpful things about my audience. Our group included children who just
graduated 5th grade and children graduating 8th grade.
Wow there is a difference. On one day we went and cleaned the training facility
of Blue Ridge Assistance Dogs. We swept, vacuumed and washed away dog hair as
well as cleaning up the outside yard.
As I was already aware, some jobs are preferable to other
jobs and no job is preferable forever. Many of these kids had no experience
vacuuming, sweeping or doing other household tasks. The tasks they most clearly
understood they were best at and the older they were the better they were at
their tasks. Two of the older girls very thoroughly cleaned the cat cage. They
have a cat at the facility so the dogs will be acclimated to cats and not go
chasing them.
So my first learning is my characters are going to start
doing age appropriate chores, though Henry is quite vocal that he hates chores.
Maybe at some point he will grow up enough to accept the responsibility of
chores. The second learning was that I write about 7th and 8th graders primarily
for a 4th through 6th grade audience. So for me this means that my
characters are dealing with the experiences of 7th and 8th
grade, but sharing them in ways appropriate for 4th – 6th
graders.
One clear example of this is in language. This was made
quite clear to me when a soon to be 6th grader very quietly and innocently came up
to me to tell me one of the soon to be 9th graders was using the f
word rather freely. I pulled the guilty party aside and said I heard he had
been dropping the f-bomb and I didn't mean fart. I told him I didn't like the
word but also explained the difference between what he says in front of his
friends and what he says in front of the younger kids.
In real life 7th and 8th graders are experimenting with such language as they seek to appear tough or mature, neither of which is accomplished through the use of the f-word. I think if I did include such language I would have one of the other characters tell the offending character that it just made him look like a little kid trying to sound tough.
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