Chalise Miner
Author-Editor-Speaker
Main Focus
Chalise writes books and articles for children and adults to challenge and cheer. Whatever the topic, she illuminates and champions that which is brave and cine within the human spirit. Her articles and essays have appeared in nation-wide magazines and newspapers. She speaks and writes to all ages on topics of the heart: family building, adoption, loss, the education and healing of broken children.
Offerings
*For elementary students: Chalise shows slides and gives a dramatic reading of her book RAIN FOREST GIRL (see Books, using button to the left), which takes young audiences to the heat, hunger and beauty of the Amazon River basin in Brazil. Students become one with the nine-year-old Die-On-Ee (Chalise's adopted daughter) as Diana learns she must leave her jungle and the troubled, only-home she has ever known. She must put on shoes, learn English and go to school. She will fly away with strangers on a "huge silver bird" to begin life over with a new family in a new foreign land.
*For grades 6, 7 & 8: The same topic but with more of the "real story" behind one child's ragged, uphill journey. Chalise answers questions students have about the Rain Forest and the adoption experience. Diana's past opens itself easily to the inspirational message about finding ways to happiness and success from past situations which have been hurtful or impossible. It also looks at the different ways we all make the journey of life, the different paths and plans it takes to honor all individuals.
*For parents and teachers and the community at large: Shared communication and enthusiasm regarding the often essential "giving up" of pre-conceived dreams for such children/students while never giving up on the "child within" these newcomer-citizens.
Every year, by adoptions similar to Diana's, over 10,000 school-age children come into American homes and our school systems. They arrive here "different" than their peers. Many delight in that difference and doggedly demand that their peers accept their best (and worst) differences before they themselves consider accepting their new world. Others try to hide ALL traces of their first world. Both paths render these children complex, challenging packages, often tenaciously trying everything they can think of to get their new caretakers and "friends" to give up on them so they may retain their feelings of worthlessness and inability. Educators challenge foreign students to become American. These same students beg their new land to see who they really are, and were, and only then consider who they can become. Both sides ultimately gain by understanding the ways we are the same in our diversity, and that there is no ONE path for each foot-soldier.
Fee
Negotiable
Contact
Phone: 405/810-1813
Fax: 405/810-1399
E-Mail:
