Back By Popular Demand

Well, it seems that the masses are clamoring for another installment of "The Life and Times of the Gold Nugget." (Full disclosure: Only one doting grandmother, known affectionately as "Me-maw" to us, has really been clamoring, but a grandma's request carries twice as much weight as the average Joe!) So now I will reproduce Tyler's offering from last week. His was written as a modified play so I don't know if it will flow as well as Darcy's did. But here goes:

Gold: "I'm a gold nugget, a beautiful, smart, still, shiny and . . . again, beautiful nugget."

Narrator: "So, how old are you? 50?"

Gold: "Pppfffft! Are you kidding? I've been here for ages! How do I know? There's my calendar right there."

Once upon a time, there were lots of miners hunting gold. More and more and more and . . . you get the picture.

Gold: "(Yawn) It's boring down here. Yep, I'm a piece of gold. Sure, you'd think I'm cool, but do you think it's cool to sit in dirt?! I didn't think so!"

(Rumble)

Gold: "It sounds like the miners' field just opened up. I wonder what's going on up there?"

Kid: "I hope I find some gold for my family." (Bump) "Ow! I just bumped my leg on a rock!" (Ting!) "Wait! That rock just shone!" (After he dusted it up a bit) "Wow, it's a big piece of gold!"

Gold: "I wonder how excited everybody else will be . . . aw, no!"

Soon a large crowd gathered around the gold. When the kid finally got through the crowd he got on a horse, rode as far as he could and slept for the night. (Yee-haw!)

Kid: "Oh no! Robbers!" (Shing! Bang!) (Editor's note: He knocked the robbers out.) "Whew! Oh no! A dust devil! Yah! Yah! Got to outrun it!"

And so he got on a ship back to his home. And to his surprise, his family didn't need any gold! So he got to keep it!

I doubt he'll have an agent anytime soon, but for a kid who'd rather talk than write, it's not a bad first draft! Incidentally, if you see some similarities between Tyler's and Darcy's phraseology, trust me, I did too! When I asked Tyler if he and Darcy had shared ideas, he assured me they hadn't. That's what I think is kind of cool and just chalk up to the sibling relationship: Very often I'll give them an assignment and when they turn it in, they'll have identical answers. I'm not talking about questions with only one correct answer; I'm talking about completely subjective questions with any number of correct answers, but their brains tend to be on the same track. As Randy says, great minds think alike!
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Speaking of talking, I should have seen this coming . . . given Peyton's propensity for rattling on and on, I should have known she'd be an ace at narration! In the early elementary years Sonlight encourages lots of narration--parent reads to child and child "re-tells" in his/her own words. Peyton is on her sixth independent reader of the year and she is AMAZING at narration. She remembers the whinny of every horse, she notices when a cowboy shakes the dust off his boots, she catches it all. Today after she'd read a couple of chapters in a new book, I asked her to tell me about what she'd read, and Tyler and Darcy happened to be sitting at the table working. After just a minute or two I asked them to stop and listen to Peyton because I was just sitting there in astonishment (again), marveling at her attention to detail. Tyler's response captures the feeling perfectly: When I asked him what he thought of Peyton's narration he said, "What did she do, memorize the whole thing?!"