“My Favorite Vacation”

My oldest daughter took a typing class this summer. She’s only 9 but typing is going to be an important skill for her in the coming years so we put her in this class. As a final exercise, she wrote a short story titled “My Favorite Vacation.” She took the course with a good friend of hers and they had a blast. The result was the story below, listed exactly as my daughter wrote it. But what is interesting is how much you could read into it. More about that after the story.

My Favorite Vacation

My favorite vacation was when I went to the Mars. I saw an Alien he said “ASDFJKL;” I think he meant to say hi. Anyways he was nice to me. Then he said the whole alphabet like this “a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z!” They communicate by typing, they have a built in keyboard. They are robot aliens. They eat words to talk BIGGER words. To them Mars is called “Electric City”. They have giant TVs, computers, cell phones (they have good connection), phones, ipods, and clocks. Everything is electric even the food!!! Pets are electric ells. You have to shock your teeth instead of brushing your teeth. I showed them how I brush my teet on EARTH, but then they said “a e i o u!” and they gave it to their pet ell, Shocky. But before I went to a different city on “Electric City” they gave me Shocky sense he liked me he gave me a shock (a kiss). Now I am in  my ell car with Shocky and we are riding off to …… CANDYLAND! Now as we approach “Chocolate Mountain” I suddenly hear some one shouting my name as we get closer I start to recognize the person and that person is Lulianne! Shocky and I get really excited its Julianne, its Julianne! Now I will have some one to shop with everyday. Luckily I still have money from my baby sitting back home so I looked in my wallet and wala A 9,999,999,999 DOLLAR BILL IN MY PURSE!!! Sooo I aked her if she wanted to go shopping and she said Y.E.S! SO WE WENT SHOPPING! But then I had good news and then I had bad news. The bad news was we had to go home (parents orders) but the good news is Julianne is blasting off with me!!! So in the morning we packed of are stuff. I hid Shocky. So we blasted off. When we got home my mom said “Where did you get this ell?” she said. “UH…..AQUARIUM?” “Keep him.” I was amazed but the day after me and Julianne tried to tell everyone about Mars but they didn’t believe us. So for the rest of our lives it was secret. THE END…..

Fun little story, no? Well as I read through it a few times, some things jumped out at me. For one, I loved how she worked the typing test into the story (the key order – asdfjkl; – , the fact that the aliens communicated by typing and they have a built in keyboard). Also, I recently tried to get her excited about the Mars Lander, so I wonder if she wrote about Mars because of that.  I personally really love the image of the robot aliens eating words to talk bigger words. You could almost think about this as reading more will allow you to expand your vocabulary to larger words. You can tell that this is my daughter writing here…lots of gadgets and gizmos present. Plenty of parenting present as well (brushing teeth, “parent’s orders,” answering to mom).

The last thing that struck me about her story was the something a bit more generalized. If you had read a story by a boy the same age, most likely it would have been full of violence, killing, guts and blood, most likely. This one, from a girl’s perspective, was much more about relationships and being social (meeting a friend, going shopping together, hanging out and sharing secrets). Girls are so much more different at this age than boys. It would have been interesting to read what boys at this age would have written.

I think that one can learn a lot by encouraging your child or children to express themselves through writing or artwork. For our family, most of the expression is through drawing of some sort. Many child psychiatrists use drawing analysis to diagnose the state of childern. So be sure to look at what your kids are drawing or writing about. You could catch early warning signs of problems or just get a glimpse into the alternate reality of a princess in training (that would be my youngest).

HTD say: Keep the creativity flowing at home. Then take some time to really look or read what you kids produce. You could learn a lot.