Picture Narrations

It's interesting to me that considering how much I love to write, it is one of the subjects that stresses me out the most when it comes to teaching my own children.  Maybe it's because I want to instill that same love in my children and I'm afraid that I'll fail and have only myself to blame.  Maybe it's because I love the art of writing but hate having to pick apart the mechanics.  For whatever reason, I'm not a fan.

One idea that the kids' advisory teacher gave me was to inspire creative writing through pictures.  The idea is to show them a picture and have them tell you a story about what is happening in the picture.  I did this with the kids together, and we brainstormed creative literary elements, adjectives, and word choices and came up with something really beautiful:

Giant antlered elk walk through the breathtaking forest.  The peaceful males silently and gracefully crunch through the leaves and snap branches under their hooves.  The beautiful leaves dance like ballerinas on the trees.  The crisp light paints the dancers orange, red, and yellow.  The wind rushes through the leaves and makes them rattle like rattlesnakes.  It hisses and whistles and chills my face.  Pumpkin pie and cinnamon spice scent the air. 

-Tori and Aaron 10/7/2013

Today, I did another one with Aaron by himself.  This time it was just him; no Tori to help.  I started by showing him this picture out of a library book (The Last Quest of Gilgamesh):

I asked him to tell me about what is happening in the story, and at first he was frustrated because we haven’t read this book yet.  I told him that it didn’t matter if he was telling me what actually happened in the story, but that I wanted him to make something up.  Here’s the first thing he spouted off:

“The lion and the person with the big white beard were trying to get past a cliff.  Two hairy half scorpion, half bug, and half hairy monsters almost killed them!  It was one hundred thousand feet down!  The lion walked forward and he almost fell down the big hill, but he didn’t because the person with the big white beard saved him.”

After some prompting and some help from a thesaurus, here’s his final draft:

Scuffy Saves the Underworld

Scuffy is an old man with a huge, white beard.  Scuffy is on a quest to the underworld to kill monsters.  Scuffy went to the zoo and bought a dangerous, African lion to help him kill monsters in the underworld.  It was twilight when they started their quest.  It was colder than an ice cube! 

They were close to the underworld when two half scorpion, half hairy monsters crept up on them.  John, the lion, tried to run away from one of the half scorpion, half hairy monsters.  He slipped off a cliff, but Scuffy saved his life by grabbing his enormous paw. Scuffy tried to pull John up, but he couldn’t get him up, so he had to throw him up and John fell on one of the monster’s back.  John was grabbing the monster’s face with one paw and scratching its tongue with his other paw.

Suddenly, Scuffy picked up a stone and threw it.  It hit the other scorpion’s eye.  It went through the eye and killed the vicious monster!  The other monster almost slapped Scuffy’s head off, but Scuffy dodged him.  John got so angry that he slapped the monster’s face.  Scuffy found the biggest rock he had ever seen.  He picked it up, jumped as high as he could, and landed on the monster’s back.  He took the rock and slapped the monster’s face five times.  Scuffy and John jumped off the monster and pushed him with all their might.  They pushed him off the cliff and he died. 

The End.

Not quite as tranquil as the elk, but I was proud of him!  Who knows, maybe I'll end up enjoying this crazy adventure after all...