6th grade Student Writing Samples

I've been working daily with our school's only 6th grader, K, on Language Arts.  We read out loud.  We write both critical essays and creative writing pieces.  We've read Number the Stars and The Giver by Lois Lowry and are currently reading Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit.  We also try to read and write poetry at least once a week.  I'm very proud of K's progress.  He impresses me with his insights, his intellect, and his sensitivity on a regular basis and those qualities shine in his writing.  He gave me permission to share some samples of his work online:

From an in class creative writing exercise in which I asked K to let weather set the mood for the piece:

The snow falls, softly, not even making a sound when it reaches the ground. The wind howls like a wolf at the dead of night. An old man, walking, in the shadows of the dark trees. No one knows where he’s going just that he’s on a journey. The darkness is his friend. Hunters with long teeth and nimble feet watch him from the trees but, they do not pounce, they have seen him before walking in the Dark woods of night. He has a secret, something only he knows, an unusual awareness. An old man walking in the woods, the trees lean over him like they might fall but, they do not. There goes the moon moving over him like a giant ball about to hit a bat.  The old man keeps walking.    

From a longer critical essay, which analyzed the Utopian and Distopian factors in Jonas's community in The Giver:

In this book The Giver Jonas, the main character, changes when he finds out that he was living in a false community. It made him realize that he was no longer living in the utopia.  His community had changed, it was now a dystopia. The elders assigned him the job of Giver (a great honor among his people)--an assignment in which he will receive memories from the past.  He receives feelings, the seeing of color, the truth.  One day when the Giver was training him, Jonas asks to see the release of a new born child, for the new child had an identical twin and he weighed the lesser of the two. In the past Jonas thought of a release as the person going somewhere outside of the community but he did not truly know what happened at a release.  He only knew that no one ever saw them again. On a screen, Jonas watched as his father injected a clear liquid into the infant’s head. The child squirmed and jerked but then the baby stopped squirming and went limp. The child’s head rolled back and Jonas realized from the blank look on the babe’s face that he was dead. Jonas stared in horror, he started to cry. From that moment on, Jonas knew he could not go home, that he had to escape. He finally noticed that the sameness had become dangerous--dangerous to a point where the people of the community had begun to do exceedingly horrid things. Utopia had become a dystopia.