D and P are not fond of writing.  If you ask them, they will emphatically tell you that they hate writing.  I happen to think that writing, and doing it well, is an important life skill and so my poor boys are given writing assignments.  At first reading of such assignments my serious mother heart sighs.  A lot of the time it’s hard to keep my eyes from rolling.  D and P revel in making any writing project as silly as they possibly can.

 This week, as part of a grammar exercise on adjectives, they had to write a newspaper article describing a local wedding.  I decided to go ahead with this one just to see what they would come up with.  They didn’t disappoint me.  One had the bride wearing a dress with ripped sleeves and the closing song to the ceremony “I’m a cow, hear me moo, I weigh twice as much as you and I look good on a barbecue”.  If I was smart, I would have commented, “How very original!” I think I just went with the typical eye rolling response.  The other had the bride in a brown sort of dress with a train two million miles long and the ceremony ending with a super loud chorus of “I hate Barney”.  I should of said, “Wow!  There must have been some special on brown material to have a train that long!”  Instead my eyes went on auto pilot and continued to roll.

Yesterday, we finished the grammar section on modifiers so I decided to switch gears and let the boys do some creative writing.  I gave each of them 5 yellow cards, 5 blue cards, 5 red cards and a stack of well-read, old Chickadee magazines.  They had to cut, paste and name characters on the yellow cards, places on the blue cards and things on the red cards.  They had a blast doing this part and judging from some of the things they put on their cards, I anticipate some pretty original goofy stories.  The next step is to put all the cards face down and draw one from each pile.  When they draw the yellow card they have to write a paragraph about the character.  After drawing the blue card, they have to write down what the character did in that setting, leaving him/her/it in trouble.  Whatever is on the red card is the item the character uses to get out of the dilemma.  I was sitting next to P as he was cutting, pasting and labelling.  Personally, I am hoping that the cards turn up “Mr. Atomic Eyeball” in the “mail bag” with the “gift wrapped watermelon”.  It should make for one wing-dinger of a tale!