My Sister is Brown Like Me

"My sister is Brown like me. She is nice sometimes. She was in my teacher's class last year. She has short and kind of short hair. She smells like soap. She helps grandma clean up the house, because she likes cleaning up the house. I love my sister. My grandma loves my sister. I do too. My sister is the best. THE END"

No, I didn't write this, and my sister is not, in fact, brown. This is one girl's descriptive writing assignment. I was going to write more about the loyalty and authority but I'm kind of overwhelmed right now (I can't keep up with my own paperwork and mess, let alone the paperwork and mess of 20 children) so I thought I'd share the kids' descriptive writing. The assignment was to pick something and describe it, using as many senses as possible. The things the kids picked to describe ranged from people (by far the most popular: me, their mom, a sister, a baby, themselves), to flowers, dogs and cats, a Game Boy, and crackers. (Did you know crackers "sound like rocks when they break"? I'm going to pay more attention from now on!)

A few of the more memorable excerpts:

RL: I have a dog that is brown, cool, and hot with fleas. We give him food. We give him flea baths. We keep him away from cats and birds. He smells like junk. He feels like a hairball.

BE: My dog can bark very loud because he is 22 years old. He smells like mud and is as soft as a pillow

JS: My dog Fluffy has little legs and sharp teeth. He is the size of a toy. Fluffy is fluffy. [At this point, the student realized that he had made a play on words and started giggling - amused himself for about 30 minutes.]

And my personal favorite in its entirety:

AJ: My teacher smells like perfume. She is light skinned. She is skinny. She is the tallest woman in the school. She sounds loud and quiet. Her hair is light brown. My teacher hair is so soft. Her eyes are green and beautiful. Her bones in her hand feel bumpy. She wears glasses because she has bad vision. She sprained her ankle because she fell down the stairs and she had to use crutches. My teacher is the best teacher in the world.

A few notes: I neither wear perfume nor am the tallest woman in the school. I do not have brown hair or green eyes. However, I am flattered by the description! In the first draft, he said I was light skinded, with the extra syllable, but he also said that "She sprainded her ankle and wears crutches sometimes because sometimes she falls down the stairs." I almost left it just because I liked it, but I thought it was probably better to teach him how to write correctly.

I was also proud because we have been working very hard on descriptions and he definitely has some description going on there!