Writing Stories

This week, I spent a few extra hours at Brown Street Academy to make up for missed time during UWM's spring break. For the first hour, I worked with a girl I have never worked with before named Anaylisha. She was very sweet and sassy, which I appreciated. She kept cracking jokes about boys and snacks and I could not believe how smart she was. They did not have any reading they needed to work on at that particular time, so we worked on writing. The class has Chrome Books which are small laptops that have a touchscreen screen, so it is very kid-friendly. Her uncle had died that morning, which she did not really talk about other than saying she was sad. We could write a story about anything, so I asked her if she wanted to write a story about her uncle. She said she did not know enough about him to write a whole story, so I asked what she wanted to write about.

First, I helped her write a story about her teacher. She said things like, "I respect Mr. Kersten. Mr. Kersten gets mad and turns red, but he is very nice." Very funny third grader things. I was worried her teacher would be mad from her honesty, but he laughed very hard. I thought it was very cool that she said she respected him. She wrote the entire thing and I just helped her come up with ideas and spelling. Her favorite part was picking the different colors for each sentence of the stories.

Anaylisha's story

Then, she asked if she write a story about me. She did not know much about me, but wrote a story about me none-the-less. She made up the story and did not ask me any questions, but made assumptions. They were very nice sentences and it brought me a lot of joy at 9 a.m. I told her I loved the story and she said she wanted to become a writer like me (because I am going to school for Journalism). Below, I have a picture of the story, but this is what it reads: "All about Gabby. She is nice. Gabby go to school at uwm. She love coffee. Gabby is funny. Gabby is going to school to write. Gabby like the color purple. Gabby like he teacher. Gabby like swimming. Gabby like panting. Gabby like street. Gabby dress pretty." I'm not sure what some of it means (Street? Panting should have been painting) and there were obvious grammatical  errors, but i still found it adorable.

Anaylisha and her friend Love wanted to take a silly picture to send to my friends...so cute!