Oh Twentybaum

This year in 4th grade my Matthew has been learning to write personal narratives. He wrote several very detailed and expressive accounts for class. I had seen him working on them and read over his rough drafts at the home. The one small detail about the personal narrative assignment that he neglected to share with me is that the point of the assignment was to recount TRUE past events from his life.

His first personal narrative involved the time he fell down the stairs at his grandparents house and broke his arm. A perfect account, that never happened. He probably would have never been found out, but his powers got away with him and his second paper was about the first time he and Paul went sky diving. He would have gotten away with that but his teacher made a chance comment to Paul that she was looking forward to reading about the skydiving experience. Paul had no idea what she was talking about, which gave it all away. Rather than look at this as a negative, his teacher LOVED the fact that none of his personal narratives done for class were true.

I asked Matthew if he wanted to use his skills to write a blog entry this year, and he graciously agreed. This is what he wrote.

Christmas In July – by Matthew

One day I was walking home from school, when I saw 10, no 15, no 20 owls sitting on a roof! Then I saw a group of pelicans on a red car! Three minutes later I saw 19 ducks, 7 owls, 10 pelicans, and over one hundred baby chicks on a wedding dress!! Then it started to snow! (oh by the way the date is July 19th, 2011) I thought I even saw a dodo bird. . . not that I know what they look like. Then people started coming outside dressed in layers! Then all the animals I saw started to come closer to me!! One person even started to say, Merry Christmas to people and started to give presents away. The next thing I knew there were people driving down the street with Christmas trees strapped to the roof of their cars! The last thing that happened before I ran home in terror of Christmas in July. . . was me hearing a lot of Christmas movies. When I got home I heard Christmas carols outside my front door!

the end