Creative Writing

Although her perfectionist tendencies tend to make her stress on the front-end of any assignment, nine-year-old Kathryn is actually quite good at things like creative writing. Her story from last week made me giggle, so I thought I'd share with you. This was inspired by assignment #5 in The Write Stuff Adventure by Dean Rea.

A few things to note in your reading: the "big black thing" at the beginning of the story was based on a day Ken photographed a spider. All spelling and punctuation is exactly as Kathryn wrote it, and no, we have never never studied proper punctuation usage; her knowledge is simply based on Charlotte Mason's ideas of learning things like grammar and punctuation naturally through the reading of good literature.

Once, there was a spider named Sam. He was a house spider, but one day a huge black thing came, made weird noises, and then took poor Sam outside. It had just snowed, and Sam was very cold. He had never been so cold in his life. He remembered a song his mom sang when Sam was a baby called "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider." It was a song about his great-great-great grandfather and his life. So Sam made that his theme song for his life. Sam headed for the nearest leaf, and when he got there, he started to work on his book again. He was writing a novel called, "A Spider's Life." This story was about a spider named Fred, a ball of yarn, a girl spider named Angel, and a spoon. Sam was an educated spider, and he loved to write, so he always had a pencil, pen, pencil sharpener, and two or three dollars to buy more pencils or paper. Safe from the snow still falling, Sam soon fell asleep. The next morning, the snow was gone, and it was sunny, so Sam crawled out from under his leaf, made his way back to the house, got inside, and was reunited with his family, and there he lives today.

Did the part about the spoon make you giggle? {grin}

(This story also reinforces my idea that unless you squish the critter, it'll end up back in the house eventually! Ken is kinder to insects than I am.)