Writers!

      I went upstairs to work on some curriculum work at my son's desk, because I needed to plug in my computer and he has an outlet.  I had just sat down, and a little voice came up from behind me. 

     "Mommy, can we read this?"

     My daughter climbed up onto my lap, and put The Dot down on top of my computer.  Of course, I can't argue with my daughter's choice of books, so we read the Peter Reynolds masterpiece.  When we finished, she decided to make her own.  I thought she meant a dot picture, but she came back upstairs with a blank book from the Target Dollar Spot and announced, "I'm better at drawing squares, not circles.  I'll call mine The Square."  (This quickly changed when her square looked more like a rectangle, so The Rectangle it became).

     She changed the characters from a teacher to Mom, and the joke that the blank white paper was a drawing of a polar bear in the snow had to switch to a seal.  I mean, seals are her animal.  And, she had to sit on my lap.  I guess Peter Reynolds and I am her muses.  He gives her the ideas, and I give her a lap of support.

     When her brother came upstairs, she allowed him to have one knee, and he also started making a book.  He decided to use a topic of his own, and chose taking his stuffed seal to school.  We clearly love seals around here.  He did the cover, and then on his endpapers he hid a seal, "just like Mo Willems would do, Mom!"  We love Pigeon, too.

     They got a few pages in, and then a snack seemed really important, and they left their shared writing space in search of food.  And, sadly, forgot to return.  But, their books are waiting to be finished, and I know that the stories yet to be told will end with a happy seal or two in the end.

     I just love that my children, who consider themselves writers, allow their ideas to start from the books they read.  One chose the story line, and the other chose the structure of the book itself.  Isn't that the foundation of author's craft that we hope our primary students receive from all those great read alouds in class?  They are a 1st and 2nd grader, who stopped their mom from doing her boring curriculum work to write stories.  What a great piece of my day! 

     Thanks, Peter and Mo, for inspiring our youngest writers, and those of us who are not so young at all.