Write about an academic fail, such as flunking a test, and a character’s recovery from it.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Saturday Newsletter: December 25, 2021
The Attack of the Christmas Lights by Eliana Pacillo, 12 (Walpole, MA) published in Stone Soup December 2021 A note from William Wow! It’s Christmas! The end of another strange year. I am in Los Angeles visiting a friend. I had planned on being in Egypt! I’d like to extend a special thanks to Emma Wood for another year of brilliant work as editor-in-chief of Stone Soup and judge of our annual Book Contest. Thanks to our fabulous staff — Sarah Ainsworth, Laura Moran, Caleb Berg, and Tayleigh Greene. Jane Levi has just left the company. Thank you to Jane for extraordinary work these last few years helping to shepherd the magazine. Thanks to all of you who have supported our 2021 Annual Drive. As we have mentioned, we are starting a big push to get Stone Soup back to self-sufficiency. We have this amazing $25,000 matching gift so everything you give between now and the end of the year is matched, doubling the value of your gift. I think the best ending to the 2021 newsletters is to leave the last word with one of our writers. I hope you enjoy this reading of a poem by Emma Hoff, one of our students. As this poem was written during one of our Saturday writing workshops, all the time she had to write it in was 30 minutes! Until next year. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Sarayu B., 11, wrote a gripping personal narrative about the time their grandmother was hospitalized with COVID-19. Analise Braddock, 9(Katonah, NY) From Stone Soup December 2021 Parallel Christmas By Analise Braddock, 9 (Katonah, NY) Parallel lines don’t stop. Christmas doesn’t stop. The snow sticks and not a light flicks out. Not a curve or a bend in a parallel line. The time ticks and tocks for Santa. Comes and goes for Christmas, but the lines of Santa’s are forever. Get ready, hang the stockings. Set out the cookies and milk. Light up the tree for a parallel Christmas. Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498. Stone Soup’s advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.
“Positive,” a personal narrative by Sarayu B., 11
Positive Sarayu B, 11 I got the news sometime in January. I was waiting, waiting, waiting for my grandmother to get better. She had tested positive for COVID-19 earlier, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed so… unreal. I’d heard about many people who got sick and even died from COVID, but I couldn’t imagine my grandma, the one I knew and loved since my birth, passing away from a small, simple illness. It was the afternoon one day—Thursday, I think—when I was told. I was in the room I share with my brother, logged into Google Meet. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we had been having school through meetings, virtually, learning everything we would normally learn. Then my mom came in, in her pajamas, which was strange. She never came into the room in the middle of my class unless I called her or she was bringing me a snack or something. She was upset. I could tell by the way she stood there in the doorway. Then she told me. The words struck me like lightning. “Ammamma got COVID,” she said simply in Telugu, smiling weakly. The way she said it, she could easily have been talking about a stranger. But no. It was my grandma, her mom. Thoughts were spiraling about in my head, but I managed to say, “How do you know?” “We were told just now,” my mom said. “She’s in the hospital.” My heart lurched. It was like being struck by lightning the second time. My mom left and walked into the master bedroom, the floorboards creaking under her feet. I tried to focus on the meeting, but I couldn’t. This piece was submitted to us via our Classroom Submissions (for teacher’s only) portal in Submittable. If you are a teacher and would like to submit your students’ work, please do so here.
