Project 118: 500 Words (third time lucky)

It was time for the 500 Words short story once again: Solomon's third attempt, and Monica's second (see Project 21: Writing a short story, Project 71: Another 500 Words!).

The big difference this year, in comparison to last, was how easy it was to get them to sit down and write a draft version - they may not enjoy the rewriting and editing, but they can now at least be left alone to write a first version without any help.

As well as writing a story, they completed some of the 500 Words worksheets, and watched the Live Lesson.

Writing their own comic strips

Live Lesson on the big screen with more worksheets

Monica's entry: The Land of Colourful goes Grey 

In the land of colourful, everything is colourful. The grass in the land of colourful isn’t just green, it is all the colours of the rainbow! Houses in the land of colourful aren't made of bricks, they are made of bright colourful crayons! One day, everything went grey and everyone was sad. Nobody knew why everything had gone grey except one little girl called Maddy.
 Maddy was seven, had blonde hair, and liked sweets and the colour red. Maddy had a special magic rainbow crayon that wrote messages to her to tell her when anyone had done something bad in the land of colourful.
 The next day Maddy told everyone the reason why all the colour had gone, and it was because a witch had cast a spell to get rid of all the bright colours. The witch’s skin was grey all over, she wore black clothes from head to toe, and her pants were grey and black, and she hated colour. She especially hated orange, pink, and red. So she cast a spell to change all of the colours to grey.
 Maddy wanted to try to reverse the spell, because she knew that everyone else was too scared of the witch. So that night Maddy stole the witch’s wand from the witch’s house in a cave when the witch was asleep. Maddy then tried to take the spell back by waving the wand around in a circle but it didn’t work. The witch started to stir, and then grabbed the wand from Maddy shouting, “One little girl isn’t powerful enough to reverse my spell!!” Maddy ran out of the cave.
 Maddy realised that it would take the power of two people to reverse the witch’s spell, so Maddy persuaded her friend Melody to go back to the witch’s cave with her the next night. This time the girls did a counterspell together and they waved the wand around in a rectangle and shouted “colouricious!” All of a sudden the colour started splatting back onto everything and the witch woke up and she was very angry so Maddy and Melody ran away with the Witch’s wand so she couldn't do any more mean spells. Everyone in the land of colourful was happy again to see all of their favourite colours back. They celebrated by baking the biggest rainbow cake ever!  

Solomon's entry: The Family Kidnap Caper

In the morning there was a knock on the door. My sister Monica went to answer the door but there was a vicious pirate standing there. The pirate had a cutlass and a dagger and a big black beard, and he kidnapped Monica! Me, my brother Sam, and my Mum and Dad chased after him, but he captured Mum and Dad too and stuffed them all into an old sack which he slung over his shoulder before running down towards the beach. Me and Sam chased him towards the beach, but we knew we needed to try to find a weapon. All we could find on the way to the beach though were some measly plastic spades, so we bought one each with our pocket money. We then saw a pirate and secretly followed him, but when he turned around we realised he didn't have a big black beard, and so wasn’t the pirate we were after.
 In the distance we saw Black Beard getting onto a pirate ship and setting sail, so we knew we needed to get a boat. We ran to the nearby harbour, and as we didn’t have any pocket money left, we decided to borrow a boat instead. We set sail and sailed for 10 days through big waves and ferocious storms, and the strong winds blew us to an island with lots of monkeys on it. The monkeys started to attack us, so we attacked them and won. We started to dig in the sand to make a shelter for ourselves from the strong winds, and when we were digging we dug up Monica as the pirates had buried her there on the Monkey island.
 We still hadn’t found Mum and Dad. We searched the island and couldn’t find a single trace of the pirates. We set sail again and saw Black Beard’s pirate ship through some rocks next to another small island nearby. We sped up and the boat and lost control, and accidentally crashed into the rocks. The damage to our boat was making it start to sink, but we leapt off just in time. We threw ourselves at the pirate ship and clambered aboard. Sam tried to free Mum and Dad while I fought the pirates with the spades we had bought. I killed the Captain by poking him in the eye with the tip of the spade, then, the rest of the pirates jumped off the ship as they were so scared of us. We eventually got Mum and Dad out of the sack which had been tied shut with rope, and when we freed them they said that they would give me and Sam £20 each for being so brave.
 Once we had sailed home we always remembered the valuable lesson we had learnt from the pirates, and that is to always look out of the window first before you unlock your front door. 

 Next project: Scotland and Burns' Night

Project 71: Another 500 Words!

To coincide with this 500 Words Live Lesson we got the kids to write their own entries for the competition (luckily Monica will just be old enough in time!).

It seemed a bit more of a slog this year than last year, but we got there in the end.

Monica's Flower and the Marshmallow Castle

Flower’s pom-pom dress bounced like a kangaroo as she skipped out of the palace for her afternoon walk. She took her pet bear with her as well. They walked through the forest looking for juicy berries to snack on because they were hungry.  

Suddenly a big swarm of bees flew along and stung them both! They cried in pain, and stumbled through some bushes. On the other side of the bushes they saw a marshmallow castle and it looked delicious. They forgot about how much their stings hurt, and they forgot about their berry hunt, they just wanted to eat the castle! As they walked closer to it,  they heard sobbing, and looked up to see lots of princesses locked up in the highest tower. 

“Move your hairy bum,  we need to rescue them!” Flower shouted to Bear.

“I want something to eat before I do any rescuing!” Bear replied.

Flower stuck her hand into the side of the castle and scooped out a fistful of gooey marshmallow, “Here, eat this quickly, the princesses need us!”

But as bear was wolfing down the marshmallow, the side of the castle started to slip down a bit. 

“Woah did you see that Bear? The highest tower just got a bit lower down when we took out some of the marshmallow wall!”

Bear didn’t say anything, he was too busy licking his lips, “mmmmh”.

“I hope you’re hungry Bear, we’ve got a lot of eating to do!”

Flower and Bear both started scooping out handfuls of marshmallow from the castle walls and gobbled as fast as they could. Their lips were sticky and their cheeks were bursting but they carried on shovelling in pink goodness. The highest tower was now nearly as low as Bear, and the trapped princesses shouted through the window, “Hurry, the King will be back soon and he will turn you into jelly tots if he catches you!” 

“You’re nearly low enough now,” Flower said, “Bear, pull at the candy cane window bars and we can lift them out!”

The candy cane bars easily snapped as Bear yanked at them, so he reached in to lift the princesses out, when the King suddenly came back. 

“Who dares to ruin my castle and steal my princesses!!” the King thundered.

“Why were these princesses locked up?” Flower asked. 

“I was going to put them in my new ice cream chocolate bar to make it sweeter, and now the recipe will be ruined!!” the King replied.

One of the princesses who had just been rescued from the tower ran towards the King and grabbed his Wrapper Zapper from his inside cloak pocket, she stood back, and then pulled the trigger. The King was zapped, and wrapped in a shiny new chocolate bar wrapper!

Bear had been busy eating the broken candy cane bars and hadn’t noticed what the princess had done, and when he turned round and saw the wrapper, he said, “mmmh, that looks tasty!”, and all the princesses laughed.

Solomon's An Adventure in TaKlinkiKlonk

“I want those ones” Sam said to the shopkeeper, pointing to the blue and yellow sweets on the top shelf in the darkest corner of the shop. 

“Those are very special magic sweets” said the shopkeeper “you can only buy them if you promise to just eat one at a time.”

“Yes, I promise.”

Sam pays for the sweets and leaves the shop with the small bag, putting the first of the sweets in his mouth as soon as he gets outside. It was like an avalanche of fruity tastes, and before he knew what had happened Sam put another sweet in his mouth.

Sam suddenly found himself in a jungle! All around him were trees, and in the trees were strange creatures. He could see lions with wings chasing monkeys with wings. An elephant with extra trunks instead of tusks eating leaves from three trees at once. A pink striped zebra with a lion’s mane was singing a song and a wingless parrot was floating in the air.

“This must be a magical jungle” thinks Sam, and just then a whale with legs came crashing through the trees and Sam jumped out of the way just in time. 

“Hello. Excuse me Pink Zebra” he called “where am I?”

“This is the magical jungle of TaKlinkiKlonk, where all the animals live happily except King Roar, a flying disappearing lion. As long as you keep out of his way, you’ll enjoy a lovely visit.” It was too late though, as just then, Sam heard an almighty ROAARRR and King Roar appeared before him. 

“I am the King of this jungle, you do not belong here” snarled Roar at Sam.
Suddenly Sam was lifted into the air by the invisible lion. The King’s sharp claws dug into his skin as he was lifted high above the trees. Sam tried to wriggle free but Roar had a tight grip on him, and flew him to his castle where he threw him in a cage and locked him up. 

Sam saw Roar sitting asleep on his stone throne not far from the cage. Sam grabbed a magic sweet from his pocket. He was just about to eat it, when he decided to try something different. With all of his strength, he hurled the sweet into Roar’s eye. The lion woke up and roared an almighty ROAAARRR, but it was too late, the lion was starting to fizzle and shrink. Steam was coming out of the lion’s ears and he looked terrified! After 2 minutes, all that was left of the lion was a pile of claws. 

After eating his last two magic sweets, Sam returned home to the real world. He skipped down his street, happy that he defeated Roar of the magical jungle of TaKlinkiKlonk. He opened his front door excited to be home and safe, “You’re late for dinner!! No dessert for you tonight!” shouted his mum. 

‘Oh well,” said Sam, “you can’t win every battle.”   

Next week's project: The Climate

Project 21: Writing a short story

Project 21 was all about writing a short story, for BBC Radio 2's annual 500 words competition.

We started the week by exploring the elements of the story, creating our own stories using Rory's Story Cubes (the actions set and the Moomins set), and watched the BBC Live Lesson 500 Words whilst doing the accompanying worksheets.

Rory's Story Cubes

Solomon then wrote, and worked on, his own story for the rest of the week: Solomon, the Desert, and the Librarian.

Version 1 was short and to the point:

Solomon was exploring a desert and found loads of books. He tries to eat them all. But it takes a long time. And there’s a rock librarian chasing after him. So he runs away. 

Although by Version 4 it had filled out a lot more:

Solomon was exploring a desert and found loads of books. He was hungry so he tried to eat them all. He ate the first one, and it tasted good because it was a recipe book with recipes for sweets. He ate a second book, but it tasted of poo, because it was a book about different types of poo, so he didn’t like it. He ate a third book, and that was another recipe book for cakes. He ate it, but it made him poorly because two recipe books in one day are too much.

But it takes a long time to eat books, and just then Solomon heard a noise. A rolling noise. It turns out it is a rock librarian chasing after him. He knows it’s a librarian because the rock has got headphones on made out of books.

So Solomon runs away and the librarian throws books at him whilst rolling towards him. One of the books is a blank book, but that’s no use so Solomon throws it at the rock librarian and it makes him bash into the sand. One of the books was about feathers, but that was no use because it just tickled Solomon’s nose. So he threw that back at the librarian. One of the books was about how to use glue and Solomon caught it. Solomon runs off around the corner and the librarian keeps rolling forwards the wrong way.

Around the corner there is a little wooden hut. Solomon munches the glue book to get the information and so makes some glue in the little wooden hut. Solomon runs back out and pours the glue onto the sand, the rock librarian rolls into it and gets stuck! The rock librarian can’t roll anymore and so Solomon grabs more books to eat and runs away.

Books can be very useful, and very tasty, but some taste of poo.

THE END.

It was an enjoyable project, and Solomon was enthusiastic about returning to the story again and again. We did have to work hard to dissuade him from setting everything in the world of Mario Odyssey and populating it with a host of other computer game characters, but I guess most five year olds have a limited understanding of the intellectual property rights associated with fan fiction!

Next week's project: More programming in Scratch!