Levi Larson
Professor Oaks
English 101
30 August 2015 An Assignment to Remember One of my first recollection of writing something major was in the fifth grade. It started when my teacher, Mrs. Webber, told my class that we were going to write, illustrate, and bind our own story books. She told us that before we started writing, we needed a protagonist, antagonist, and two or more situations. For my main character I created a beaver named Frank E. Beaver. Frank had a best named Jack and an arch enemy named Russ the Hunter. I also devised two situations for my story. One was that Frank’s teeth never quite grew large enough for him to gnaw wood, making it difficult to make himself a home. The other situation was that it was beaver season and Russ the Hunter was on the prowl. Of course, in the end, the main character defeats the bad guy and the problems are solved. After my classmates and I had brainstormed, written, illustrated, bound, and laminated our books, our next assignment was to swap books with our classmates until everyone had read each book. Many of the books were similar to mine with talking animals and horrible humans. We were assigned to have a critique of each book, good or bad. The feedback I gave to my classmates was similar to the feedback that I received. I heard the same three words, “It was good!” over and over again. So either my book was actually “good” or nobody knew what to say other than that. I was complimented on my illustrations many times. In the end, I think we were pretty proud of ourselves and each other. When it was all said and done, I had written a book. I couldn’t have been happier. I had a “real” book and it had my name at the bottom. Along with being extremely proud of what I had achieved, I was beyond ready to write my next big hit project book. To this day, I still have “The Adventures of Frank E. Beaver” and another book that I wrote shortly after out of excitement called “The Diary of Frank E. Beaver”. Looking back, I realize that my book was definitely written by an eleven year old. It was pretty rough, but I’m still proud of one of my first big writing experiences.