Last week on February 9th, kids ages 5-8 came to the library to do some fun creative writing.  First we learned about the difference between “First Person” point of view, with lots of I, Me, My, We, Our, Us words, and Third Person point of view, with lots of He, She, Them, They, Him, Her, It words.  We also discussed how first person narration focuses more on a character/narrator’s personal feelings and reactions to things, while third person narration just relays facts and details from an outsider’s perspective.

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Then we read a really fun book by David Wiesner that bends perception between first person and third person, going from a typical retelling of The Three Little Pigs to a whole new story where the pigs jump out of the pages of that book and fly throughout fairytale land.  It’s called The Three Pigs and it was the inspiration for the project we did later on:

So now for the project we did: we did a project about imagining other fairytale or nursery rhyme characters escaping from their stories.  Kids were asked to write a story from the fairytale character’s first person point of view.  They could choose from a range of different characters and I provided illustrations I got from the Internet and altered so that in one illustration the character is there, and in the next illustration the character is disappeared.

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I also have these wonderful “Make a Story” books that I purchased online in bulk, and I adapted them for our Feb. 9th class to have an “Escaped!” poster on them, wild-west style:

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This is the book that I created and read to the kids as an example.

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The kids got right to work choosing characters and illustrating their front covers:

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Parents helped them come up with ideas.  One little boy had trouble coming up with ideas and the whole group brainstormed some funny ideas for him.

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Here are some of their finished books!

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And this time I got some video of the kids reading their stories.  I love this–think I’ll do it again next time:

 

Our next Creative Writing for Beginning Readers workshop will be Tuesday, March 8th. Call the Children’s Desk to register: 626-744-4066 option 4, or email anhurtado [at] cityofpasadena [dot] net.