Saturday, October 20, 2012

A Scottish Story

For our literature curriculum, we have been studying various Caldecott Winners using this book from Evan Moor.  Our latest book was "Always Room for One More" which was illustrated by Nonny Hogrogian.  It's actually based on a Scottish folksong. 
To learn and remember what several of the Scottish words mean, the kids were supposed to write each of them in a sentence.  From the beginning, Secundus was very insistent that she wasn't just going to think of individual sentences; she wanted to write a story.

Following is what she dictated to me.  (the underlined words are the vocabulary words.)

One bairn was walking along.  My daddy's mother said, "You can't walk in the middle of the street at night!"  That's blether.  And my daddy's mother didn't know he was walking on a brae.  She thought he was walking in the middle of the street.  Daddy didn't know that his mother was canny, which is smart.  "Och!"  My daddy didn't know that it was raining.  My daddy's mother made porridge for him when he came inside.  But when his mother slammed the door he saw something wee which was a little mouse.

I was very impressed with what she came up with.  When I read it to Hubby, he almost choked because he started laughing so hard.  Apparently that very morning as he was walking down the street with the girls (they had to park around the corner because of street work going on) he told them about when he was younger he would sometimes walk in the middle of the street at night.  I guess the girls got very passionate and told him all about how awful and dangerous that was for him to do and that Grandma shouldn't have let him do that.
So now her story makes sense!  Apparently the topic was fresh in her mind.

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