a first for Luke

I am so proud of Luke. He is doing fabulously with his schoolwork this year.

We recently finished reading The Boxcar Children together and he loved every moment of it. I don't know what it is exactly about this book, but Luke liked it above and beyond other read alouds that we have enjoyed together.

Today, I asked him to narrate the story back to me. Not every detail or part, but to give me an idea of what happens in the beginning, the middle and the end of the book in his own words. After speedily narrating this to me, we wrote it on little "boxcar paper," cut it out, and put it together to form a little book.

Luke is quite proud of the end result and I am really proud of him too. I really enjoyed finding out which parts of the book especially stood out to him (several days after finishing it) and seeing how he put it into words. Here is his narration (completely in his own words) for posterity.

The Boxcar Children is a great story. It is really fun. In the beginning of the boxcar children, they are looking at a bakery window. They go in and Henry, is the oldest and he bought some loaves of bread. There’s four children and their mother and father died so they have to buy lots of loafs of bread to survive. They are in a boxcar because they have no where else to live and if they live in a house, they don’t know where things were. And they found a dump for treasure. And they look for stuff like dishes, pots and Violet found a kettle. At the end of the book there was their grandpa and Henry run a race that had a golden cup with diamonds on it and a thousand dollars. It was a foot race, but he didn’t care he just wanted to run it because it was fun. When he got home Violet decided that Jessie was sick. In the very end, their grandpa came and said he had a surprise and it was very heavy. And it was the boxcar! He put it between two fountains and there was a bunch of flowers by the fountains and there was the shelves and the pot and the broom and Benny’s pink cup. And that is the end.