Newberry awards

When I was in school writing was never my strong suit. I didn't have a flair for it, it didn't come easily, and I didn't enjoy it much. And unfortunately, now as I am homeschooling, since I don't have a love for writing like I do science and math and art and history and others, I have shown the tendency to not press too hard for my kids to do a lot of writing. But this year I have tried to be better about that since writing will play such a huge part of the continuation of their education.

Part of that was by having the two older boys write and illustrate a story yo enter into the PBS Young Writers Contest. And although I am entirely biased about the whole thing, I absolutely LOVE the stories and pictures they came up with! Garrett did such a wonderful job on his pictures, and Owen's story is one of the best I have ever read!

Here is Garrett's story:A long time ago, a fairy was walking to the fairy parade, which was in a town called Arts-burg, because the fairy mayor lived there.

(I let them use water color paints to color their pictures, and both boys absolutely loved painting their pictures!)Just then, a huge dragon came roaring and snarling up the road, but not at her. She saw a bullet that was shot in his hand and that was why he was so mad.

(Garrett used a step-by-step drawing book to learn how to draw dragons and castles, isn't he a cute dragon?!)That fairy's name was Camille, she was a winter fairy, so whatever she passed froze.

(Garrett loves this picture of Camille, I love her hands and how he made it look like her wings were moving!)

She knew that she could help him, so she froze him completely then pulled the bullet out of his hand. After he thawed out and woke up, the dragon told her that his name was Fox and that he wanted to be a friendly dragon.

(He is a lefty, so he traced his left hand with his right to make it look scary, and then he traced Emmy's hand to be the fairy hand! Clever kid!)

So Camille made a deal with him that if he did not eat the fairies then they would protect him so that he would never get shot again.

And to this day the fairies are friends with the dragons, and although they might not be seen too often, they are still out there being friends to each other.

(He wanted to make it look like sunset, I think he did great on it!)

Here is Owen's story with his drawing and waterpaintings:

(Owen had a step-by-step dino drawing book that he used - except he just copied the final picture instead of following all the instructions!) (This is my favorite picture out of all of his, I think! I love his little face and his square teeth!) (This picture is Owen's favorite. He colored each little leaf individually and was so proud of how the wings turned out!) (Isn't that a great ending?! And see the book he is going to read, it's the front cover of his book! He came up with that on his own!)

Garrett REALLY, desperately wants to win first place in the nationals because the prize is a laptop :-) I don't know what an 8 year old would do with his own laptop, but he says, "it would actually be really good for my studies... I could plug a thumb drive in and, voila..." What happens at voila, I'm not sure, but he seems to think it is a good thing. Second place is a digital camera, which I thought would be more up his alley, and then third place is a MP3 player, which is also cool enough for a third grader. But those are all national prizes, so the likelihood of us seeing them is fairly slim. They will for sure get a neat certificate, though, so that will be cool, too :-)

I had to mail the originals into the contest, but not before I made come color copies of them to keep for myself! I love looking back in a few years and remember their new writers handwriting and their coloring skills. We look back at Tig's from when she was Garrett's age with happiness, and I am sure we will do the same to these ones!