English teachers, as you know, love to teach writing. They also love seeing their students’ faces, even virtual faces.
Today was the last Zoom meeting with my writing students — not the preschool kind, but the older kind — until January. So, we wrote a “picture story” together.
The rules are simple: Choose a series of three pictures. Write a sentence that states the “central fact” of each picture. Use those as both the topic sentence and the clincher sentence in each paragraph. Fill in with details. Make it fictional.
Oh, and when you’re filling in the backstory, please use past participle verbs. Okay? Okay.
Here’s what we did today —
The Great Goofy Gingerbread Caper
by Mrs. B’s JW67 Writing Class
Emiline lay very still atop a sheet of cardboard while Oma traced her body with a sharp pencil. She and her cousins, Miss Nomi and Mr. Mo, had decided to bake giant gingerbread cookies of themselves. Having read The Gingerbread Man by Richard Scarry several times, Miss Em just knew they could design life-sized replicas of that delicious character. Secretly, Mr. Mo had planned to inject each cookie with a concoction. He wanted his cookie to run, and he wanted to chase it throughout the neighborhood. Naturally, he also wanted to eat it. Losing his cookie to a smarty-pants fox was not part of his plan. He had to be sneaky, though. The girls would not approve. As Oma drew around Miss Em’s body, he and Miss Nomi waited their turn to make cardboard patterns of themselves.
Just thirty minutes later, the preschoolers modeled their Gingerbread Kid patterns while the grandparents took a picture. Next, they shooed the Oma and Opa out of the house, hoping to mix the dough, shape the bread, and bake their ginger models alone. They knew how to do it. With the biggest mixing bowl available, Miss Nomi poured molasses, cracked five dozen eggs, and began to stir. Miss Em dumped 25 pounds of flour into the bowl as Mr. Mo carefully mixed the spices. “This be fun, right?” he asked the girls as the heavy dough took shape. One wrong move would spell disaster. Cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg — and Mo’s secret ingredient from Oma’s chemistry closet – were finally added to the mixing bowl. It was time. None of the preschool scientists anticipated what might go wrong when they had modeled their cardboard bodies for the photograph.
Just as the kitchen timer signaled that the cookies were cooked, Scout plopped her fat, furry body atop the gingerbread cutouts on Oma’s desk. As the hot treats leapt out of the oven, they darted through the front door. Mr. Mo’s concoction had worked! Miss Em, Miss Nomi, and Mr. Mo raced after them in hot pursuit, calling as they ran: “stop, stop before you all skid! We made you and we’ll eat you, you gingerbread kids!” But sadly, they could not catch their cookies. Disappearing over the hill, those gingerbread kids laughed their gingerbread laughs and high-fived each other. Yes, they had escaped for now. As the three cousins trudged back home, they talked about what to do better next time. “I’ll leave out the concoction,” sighed Mr. Mo. “We’d rather eat our cookies than chase them up the road. Right?” Miss Em and Miss Nomi agreed, and planned to begin their cookie project again, just as soon as they removed Scout from atop their cardboard models.
The End.
Well, the end until January, students. Thanks for working hard and writing well. Lord willing, I’ll see your faces again in a few weeks!