I’m one of the retirees who have been help­ing ten fifth graders who want to write. (When oth­er kids see us pass­ing through the school halls, they ask, “Are you the grand­mas?” Yep, that would be us.) This week we will deliv­er their fin­ished book. They will each get two copies—one to keep and one to give away to a favorite per­son. (Or, two to keep—their choice.)

All of the chil­dren wrote one, or more sto­ries, we edit­ed them, made sug­ges­tions, they learned that writ­ing is also rewrit­ing. Some illus­trat­ed their sto­ries. One cre­at­ed the cov­er. One boy was def­i­nite­ly writ­ing a book, but he man­aged to make a sto­ry out of the first two chap­ters. One of the girls seems des­tined to take Steven King’s place, but since she was also pro­lif­ic, we encour­aged one of her sweet stories.

They accom­plished quite a bit in a half hour a week, espe­cial­ly since there were sev­er­al late days for snow that seemed to always hap­pen on our Tues­day morn­ing at the school. They did their writ­ing on a com­put­er eas­i­ly using a hunt-and-peck sys­tem they had each worked out for them­selves. (Although it was easy to trans­fer their work, I real­ly do think it might be bet­ter to teach typ­ing skills before using the key­board. But I’m def­i­nite­ly of the old school—learned how to type in high school on a man­u­al typewriter.)

But, enough of that. I enjoyed work­ing with the kids. I’ve got to say, at least one inner city school is giv­ing the chil­dren lots of choice in their edu­ca­tion, for we could not have done this with­out some coop­er­a­tion from the over­worked teachers.