Zoe has been working on a writing assignment for a while now. It has taken longer than it should have because we left the country in the middle of it and then it was forgotten. The assignment was to write a letter to an imaginary cousin from the Old Country either suggesting that they come to this country or not. To do it right, the kids had to put themselves in the character of a child of the early colonies over 200 years ago.
For some reason, this assignment really spoke to Zoe. She started out putting "-eth" on the end of all her verbs and taking a silly "old-fashioned" approach. But at some point she got pretty serious about it. She did a little research into the appropriate language of the time and corrected her draft accordingly. She found some manilla construction paper to use as parchment paper for her final draft. She painstakingly wrote her final draft in "old-fashioned-looking" cursive script, with curly-ques between the paragraphs. She brought her beautiful final draft for me to admire, and then said, "I don't think it looks old enough" as she crumpled it into a ball.
That's when I had my great idea. "We could burn the edges to make it look even older!" She loved it, and we got right to work over the kitchen sink. I started out small, singing a corner her, a hole there. But the third time I touched the lighter to the paper, I didn't blow the flame out quickly enough and things got out of hand. As the flame grew and started to race across the paper, I realized that I was burning up hours of my daughter's work. As I frantically blew at the growing flame and considered turning on the faucet to make it stop, I knew that she was going to have to redo the whole thing.
Aggggghhhh.
I finally put the fire out. The bottom left-hand eighth of the paper was gone. No getting it back. I looked at Zoe, knowing she was going to be furious. But she was grinning from ear to ear. "That looks GREAT!!!" she says. "So you're not mad?" "NOOOOO! It's COOL." I pointed out that you could no longer actually READ a good part of the letter, but she said she was going to present it as an artifact and she would read from her rough draft and say it was the version she decoded during her research.
Strange bird that she is, I've got an amazing kid.
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3 comments:
This reminds me of an assignment I had in 2nd grade. Mrs. Vervalin (not spelled correctly, but I only recall how it sounds) wanted us to write a pirate story. So, I wrote my story on my Big Chief tablet, tore the paper out, walked to the little sink between the classrooms, and ran the water over it. Mrs. Vervalin wouldn't accept it, so I had to write it again. Since she hadn't explained why she wouldn't accept it, I did the exact same thing. When I turned it in for the second time, she asked me why I'd poured water all over it.
"Because this story just washed ashore!"
Needless to say, I had to write it a third time and turn it in dry. Some people just don't udnerstand art...
Hahahahah. I would have given you an A+!!
Oh my gosh!!! I had almost the exact same experience with Alyssa. She had crumpled the assignment and then decided it wasn't old looking enough. So there we were deciding to burn the edges, paper over the sink, burning out of control and everything...except I did turn on the faucet and got the bottom portion all wet. After we exchanged shocked looks and nervous giggles, she looked at me and said "awesome"! I tell you our girls are perfectly matched!!
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