During a past superhero-themed writing class, a character named Super Kitty was born. The young writer, a second grader at the time, had drawn cute illustrations to accompany the story. And when she shared it aloud with the mixed-age class, everyone went wild with compliments.
In the student’s next story for an Indiana Jones-inspired class, Super Kitty made another appearance, this time telling the tale from her own perspective.
And the next story? You guessed it! Super Kitty went on to visit ancient Egypt!
Around this time, her mom asked me if her daughter should try writing about something else. I thought about it and answered that her daughter already was writing about “something else.” It takes a lot of insight and creativity to launch Super Kitty into so many different places and time periods and face such a variety of challenges.
Not to mention that the student eventually made the decision to develop more characters on her own. Super Kitty and Super Seal faced down gladiators in Rome. Super Kitty graciously allowed a dog to tell a farm story from his point of view. And Super Kitty and a whole cast of characters took the stage during our reader’s theater-inspired workshop.
The ultimate compliment came when a fellow classmate included Super Kitty as a character in her OWN story! It was magical.
I had a similar situation when another student loved sports. He was able to weave baseball into dinosaur and Phantom Tollbooth-inspired writing assignments. The student took it as a personal challenge to include sports no matter what! And he, too, developed quite a fan base among his classmates.
Nothing makes me happier than kids finding characters, topics, themes … anything … they like to write about!
What do your children like? It’s gonna be great!