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.
