My kids have always had wild imaginations and made up all kinds of fantasy tales. One of the worst effects of the oldest kid’s year in public school was that she stopped telling stories, stopped writing. This year we started off following the writing assignments in her curriculum, but pretty early on I dropped that in favor of simply getting her to write anything at all, on any subject she could get interested in.
Here we are at about the halfway point in the school year. Yesterday I gave her an assignment: write a story. It could’ve been a single page and that would have fulfilled the assignment. Instead, she wrote until her arm was tired. Then she wrote some more after she rested. She got up to write some more this morning and she’s still at it.
She has a princess, a prince, a servant, a witch, a guard, a rescue bird and a dragon in her cast of characters. They’ve been all over on wild adventures from flying to being lowered into a volcano.
I really don’t care that her story’s resolution includes a deus ex machina. She’s writing, and having a ball. She’s let her imagination loose in the world of story. That’s what I wanted her to relearn this year.
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