My good friend Susan100 suggested this, after seeing the ressurection of the Kids Joke thread. And I thought it sounded fun.
Paidhi Girl is seven, nearing the end of first grade. One night a few weeks ago, she smuggled a pencil and a piece of paper into bed, and came creeping out at 9pm, when I thought she was surely asleep, to announce that she’d written me a story.
Well, it amused me. I think she did a pretty good job, considering. I’m hoping she’ll give up her project of getting me to write more Space Cat books, and realize she can do it herself, but I think that’s still a ways off.
Got any budding writers of your own? I think it would be fun to read.
Yumblie, I laughed out loud at your story! That was wonderful. And, btw, Paidhi Girl liked your story, too. Believe me, I’ve seen weirder. The kids in Paidhi Girl’s class each wrote a story for a book that they then had printed and then parents and grandparents could buy copies. (Three Pigs was not her contribution to that volume.) And they were some amazing compositions, no question. The teacher had apparently read them a standard fairy-tale type thing, with three contestants for the hand of a princess venturing into an enchanted forest, and then told the kids to write something about an enchanted forest, and nearly all the kids just plunked down random elements of the original story with no understanding of how or why they were put together the way they were. They nearly always made themselves the winning contestant (although it was never clear what “winning” meant, how one won or what anyone got for winning) and then added random elements from their personal lists of favorite things–mermaids named Ariel, kittens, or, my favorite, a dwarf with a rocketship.
lola, I’m impressed at the way you rearranged the sentence order to make it scan. I don’t think my daughter would have thought of that, and I don’t think I would have, at that age. You were doing pretty darn good.
My veterinarian has a scrapbook in his waiting room from the time he gave a presentation to a first grade class. Dr. P took in a couple of animals and talked to the kids about caring for their pets. Then the kids each drew a picture and wrote a sentence beneath the picture. The typical sentence was “Dr. P is nice” or “The kittens are cute”, etc. One child, beneath a picture of Dr. P and what appeared to be a dog, wrote, “Without him all animals would die.”
A childhood neighbor had a cat named Inky. One day when my brother was about three, he came running into the house, very distraught, and uttered what I consider to be one of the most profound pieces of poetry every composed concerning the frailty of life and the loss of innocence. It goes like this:
