With my English class, I recently wrote a short story about a Beaver named Doc who is a lumberjack, and lives in a lake near Manhatten. The process of writing this story with them was pretty hilarious. When I asked my students what the problem of our story should be, one of my students (Ayrton) said, "A
bunch of businesses from the city should move near his lake and he hates the businesses." I said, " Great idea Ayrton! But how can we solve that problem?" He replied, "Well that is my problem. I'm really good at making problems and not so good at coming up with solutions." Back to the story though, it is about a beaver who gets a cute lady beaver neighbor. He wants to be friends with her so he brings her firewood as a house warming gift. She slams the door in his face and he is confused. She later explains that she hates deforestation. She explains that deforestation hurts the environment by ruining the water, air, and land. He does some thinking and comes back to her house with seeds. Then they live happily ever after planting seeds together and being best friends. It was a pretty adorable story. We presented the story to the parents of the class and while you can pretty obviously see my influence (deforestation theme), the parents loved it. That day I ended up being in the newspaper for my English class, got a "participation award" for my English class, did a radio interview and a TV interview. It was a pretty crazy day. Here are a few pictures of the girls in my class reading the story and a few of my favorite pages from the story.
