Monday, February 21, 2022

SIDE BENEFITS

     All my spring cleaning has brought about some surprises. In moving furniture and cleaning drawers I've found some things that I had forgotten about.

     When I retired from teaching, 25 years ago, brought home some treasures that I thought I might look at and throw away. I did look at them but didn't throw any of it away and then promptly forgot about them. My classroom was full of "stuff" that I used. Since I made up my mind to retire a year before I retired, I had lots of time to get rid of things. I had free garage sales where I laid things out and people could take what they wanted.

     I taught language arts to middle school kids. I had many prompts to get kids writing. For example , I would say make a list of ten relatives. Then we would go through the ten names and pick the one you wanted to write about.

   I always did the assignments that I gave the kids. Sometimes I wrote my piece of writing on the chalk board and got them to discuss it with me. Usually they wrote a rough copy and brought it to me and we talked about a few things and then they wrote a finished copy. I would prompt them for more detail. Maybe change the order. Check the words they chose to see if they could find something better.

    Well, all these pieces of writing came home. The other day I got to look at them again. 

   I wrote about one of my brothers and since it was his birthday a few days ago , I said I would send him a birthday present. When I went to scan the piece of writing the scanner wouldn't work but that's another story. 

   So here's a piece I wrote about my daughter. Of course, all of you know her. 

    I hope you can make this darker so you can read it. 


      It was about this age that I first met the determined streak . She's seven months old here.