Mochi Dude, Body Dude & Hot Cocoa Dude: How Silly Characters Can Reframe Essay Writing
- REEL Team
- 21 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Transcript
Moderator: Thank you. Welcome. Welcome to the 2026 Real Strengths Fair. Real is a nonprofit committed to ensuring Silicon Valley's twice exceptional students thrive in school by raising awareness among parents, educators about practical research-based strategies to meet their needs. You can join our online speaker events, support groups, and get our resources at real2e.org. We are thrilled to host our second fair focused on empowering neurodivergent children through a strength-based approach and even more thrilled to welcome our speakers Susan Roy Ho and Roy Hada for their talk "Mochi Dude, Body Dude, and Hot Cocoa Dude: How Silly Characters Can Reframe Essay Writing."
Writing coaches Susan and Roy of Beyond the Box Learning are passionate about teaching youth and teens ages 7 through 21 how to organize their thoughts and write with power, clarity, and ease. Since 1996, they have collaborated with students to develop highly interactive, playful, and visual strategies for writing essays, research papers, poems, short stories, and even their first novels. Miss Ho and Mr. Hada teach English curriculum courses for homeschooling groups, host story workshops, and run two thriving young writers clubs in the Bay Area.
On a personal note, I've been a huge fan of Roy and Susan ever since my now 13-year-old son, Adam, right here, attended one of their summer camps three years ago. He's participated in several of their classes and camps since then. And now Adam's little sister Gabriel, who's sitting next to him, is excited to finally be able to participate for her for the first time in one of their camps this summer. And with that, please help me welcome Roy and Susan. Thank you so much.
Royd: Thank you so much, Susan. Super honored to be here. Um it's interesting. We we never advertise. Though we do have like these linden tree free story workshops every month. So if you're interested, you can go to our booth and you can sign up. We'll have a QR code at the end. My name again is Roy. We're Beyond the Box. This is Susan Ho. Um and we're going to be teaching you an essay structure that is very simple.
Now who is doing a little bit of essays right now for their kids and where they're in the middle? Yeah. Okay. Great. Middle schoolers. Great. High school students. Elementary school students. Yep. Okay. Great. Excellent. Well, you know, typically what we'll do is like we'll start our kids off with story and because like story is so powerful as a way to kind of get our pens moving, right? But eventually they'll get to this essay and we want to keep it as fun and interesting and entertaining as possible.
And actually the story behind this is that we didn't really come up with this idea. This actually came from our students because we were kind of like figuring out how to do this essay. We knew the structure but going just by pure text is is kind of tough and you know there's a sequence and it can get kind of complicated. So we started drawing and we always allow our kids to draw at first in order to kind of get their pens going. But eventually we started to see like "Oh, does this work for another student? Does this work for you?" Pretty soon this became like a kind of a core idea behind our teaching around essays. So thanks to our students. Yes, we take very little credit for this actually.
In front of you you have a pen or a pencil and a paper. We're going to do a little bit of workshopping here today. All right. I'm going to invite you to stand with us. And this is like the Linden Tree here. The children's bookstore. Now it's a full-blown bookstore with adult books as well. And we do these again monthly workshops. Next up—and this is us being silly earlier. We try to not take things so seriously. It's kind of like a core thing idea. And then we always say, you know, if you lose the ability to laugh, you lose the ability to think. Who's ever heard of that particular kind of phrase before? It's from Clarence Darrow, who is like a civil rights and labor attorney, right?
Here are some characters that our students actually invented. So, a core idea about story is like characters, right? So it's like no wonder this thing kind of works because we think about characters and this is like from other methods that we work with—"BAD TOAD"—which is like Backstory, Action, Description, Thoughts, Observations, Dialogue, and Emotions. And then we have like a whole series really like six different characters. Trickster—a lot of our kids love these kinds of characters. They make these images and we make stickers for them. You can probably find some of these characters on our table, right?
More characters—and we'll probably see variations of our own handwritten version, but some kids love Procreate and they've made their own kind of versions here. Okay, we're gonna go straight into it. So, this is Mochi Dude. And if everybody can get their pencils and their papers, we're going to do a very quick sketch. We're going to do some drawing here. All right. If you don't have like a hardboard, you could probably use the seat or something like that.
So Mochi Dude looks like this. It looks like a mound here. And we have a little bit of a hookie kind of thing, a curly-cue thing. We have these eyes, and these eyes are kind of looking at different directions here, right? We have a nose here that's very pointy. We have a mouth here and we have three fangs. Can you imagine like some kid drawing this on their own? Not from us, right?
Essentially what we have here is, at the beginning of an essay, we have an opening hook. Something that'll grab our attention to kind of pull us in. So you can just call this a hook or you can call this an opening hook. Don't worry about all the details about it. We're just kind of basically labeling things right now. And then next we have these kind of two eyes looking kind of weirdly derpedly like at opposite directions. This is called the "Some people think, but really."
So when you think about it, it goes like "Some people think A, but really B." Does that make sense? Who's ever heard something like that? It's kind of like "Some people believe X, but really scientists have found or discovered that this is true," right? It's like a setup and it gets us steered towards the thesis, which is the main point. And it's pointy because it's like the main point, right? So this is the thesis. Some kids don't remember "thesis" eventually they'll remember, but sometimes they go "main point" or "the big point." And then we have these three points. We call them the three reasons—one, two, three.
Next up, this is called Body Dude. Body Dude looks like this: it's a top hat, we have a face, happy face, then we have our arms and our hands. The hands have like a little mini thing here—little paper—and then we have boots. At the top, this top hat is going to be our topic sentence. Don't worry about how to do a topic sentence right now. Essentially, it's like your thesis plus one of your reasons.
Next is the "DFNs"—Data, Facts, or Numbers. Some people call this the evidence. But when we say evidence, a lot of kids' minds go blank. But if I say data, facts, numbers—especially numbers—they go, "Oh, yeah." Like "there were 99 billion cells in this one lizard." Then they go, "Oh, yeah, that's a fact." And by the way, we do these silly fake essays first for several sessions so they get the structure right without stressing out on whether the facts are true.
Next up is the story example. This is where we really start to harp on things because STEM kids love data and facts, but readers aren't really going to remember those facts. The story is super important because it humanizes the data. So for now we'll just say "story and example." The last part is boots, and it's the "benefit." By doing all this stuff, what do we get? What are we supposed to know? It's meant to encapsulate all the information in that paragraph.
Next is Hot Cocoa Dude, our conclusion. Usually they'll have three different body paragraphs and then a conclusion. Hot cocoa dude looks like this: three steamy things, happy eyes, a cup handle, and little mini boots on top of the world. Or "Stinky Underwear Dude" if some kid wants to be silly.
At the top, the steam tells us to "restate your main point or your thesis plus your three reasons." The eyes are an "even though." As in, "even though X, there's Y." For older students, we'll say "Of course A, but B instead." It's basically the rebuttal part. And then we have the "world benefit." It has the same formula, but it's basically for the world.
Royd: All right, let's do an actual version. Someone give me a random silly topic.
Audience Member: Zombies cannot be turned back into humans.
Royd: Okay, zombies. Why is that true? Give me three reasons.
Audience Member: Because they're already dead. They don't eat very healthy. And their neurons are gone.
Royd: Great. So we have our thesis and three reasons. For our Mochi Dude opening, "Some people think that zombies can come back to life, but really they cannot." Now for a Body Dude paragraph. Let's practice on "they don't eat healthy." Topic sentence: "Zombies cannot be turned back into humans because they do not eat healthy food."
Now, some silly facts or numbers. "According to the recent Research Institute of Zombies, brains have no carbohydrates; they're pure protein." When we turn from silly essays to serious ones, students already know they need an "according to expert X" or certain statistics.
Now for the story example. Let's name a zombie—Bob B. Bro. Once in the year 7632, Bob B. Bro ate too many hot and sour curly French fries and got "zombie sickness." He barfed for two hours straight, his temperature was 200 degrees, and his toes fell off. But he was still alive. In fact, he lived more than 10,000 years. Kids are going to remember the story of Bob B. Bro barfing much more than the data facts and numbers.
The benefit: "By eating unhealthy food, zombies are able to withstand extreme things and survive for 10,000 years." When students are comfortable with this, we start having them do persuasive essays and literary analysis.
Now for the conclusion. We restate the thesis: "Zombies cannot be turned back into humans because of reasons one, two, and three." For the rebuttal: "Even though they eat fast food, there are enough electrolytes to keep them as zombies." Finally, the world benefit: "By surviving every kind of disaster, zombies can outlive any living thing and teach whoever is left how to restore the planet as it should be."
It's a crazy way to do it, but crazy and fun is the way to go.
Royd: My name again is Roy, and we're Beyond the Box. You can email me for the template and PDF. We have story workshops at Linden Tree Books for ages 7 to 11 and teens.
Shu-Shein: We have a film analysis course in person in Palo Alto for teens ages 12 and up. We also have an online zoom course on comparative literature. For the summer, we're looking for families to host one-week teen workshops.
Royd: Any other questions? One of our students just switched to public high school and said this essay structure is really helping him in his high school courses. We've been here for over 20 years. Thank you so much for joining us.
Moderator: Thank you. There's a couple more minutes until the fair closes. Feel free to come up and ask Roy questions or head out to the exhibit hall. Thank you everyone for coming.