Good Morning! Hey, it’s morning somewhere!

In this Post I will talk about 5th Grade Humanities. This quarter we did a lot of projects but one of my favorites was My Personal Narrative. We made a story in our writer’s notebook and then a few weeks later we picked a sentence from that story that we could add on to and make more interesting. Here is my Personal Narrative:

The Lake

I went to a lake with my friends Chloe and her little sister Anuk from Germany. I met Chloe 2 days after I was born in the same hospital as her. She was born on May first and I was born on May second. She lived right next to central park in a brownstone and we would always go to her house on Saturday mornings. Then, two years ago Chloe, Anuk, her dad and her mom moved to Berlin in Germany because, her mom really wanted to go back and be in her home country.

My family and Chloe’s family were both in the same region of France without planning it so, we met up at lake and had a little reunion. Chloe’s mom and my mom had gone away to get pizza and look around the gorgeous town we were staying in so, me, Chloe, Anuk and Margot all went down to the beach and when we put our toes in we found out that it was connected to the ocean and it had tides. When we finally, finally got our bathing suits on we laid down and just listened to the sound of the beach. We heard: the soft sound of the water brushing up against the sand, the whap, thump, whap of the volleyball game going on behind us, the screams of the children and the shouts of the swimming instructors.

I saw a little sandbar poking out of the glassy water. I really wanted to go swim to it! I asked Chloe, Anuk and Margot if the wanted to try and swim there, and they all said yes and we’re super excited about it. We knew it would be lots of fun and that we could make it because we are all strong swimmers. What we didn’t know was that there was an extremely strong current we just knew there was a current and that there were really sharp, jagged rocks that can cut your feet if you just brushed your feet against them.

When we got in the water Anuk jumped right in and started doing the doggy paddle all the way to the sandbar. She started to drift with the current so I jumped in and held her and and we both swam to the sandbar. When Margot saw that I could do it she jumped and swam there no trouble at all. Chloe was a little hesitant but I helped her and when she could stand I let her go and sped ahead to make sure that Margot and Anuk were Ok. We chilled on the sandbar for about 15 minutes making sand castles, talking about the view and catching up because we hadn’t seen each other for two years.

All of a sudden the teal water started to creep silently up our sandbar. It was becoming high tide! We started to get really panicked because we knew rip tides and currents got stronger at high tide. I tried to get in the menacing water but as soon as I got up to chest height the water the current started to whisk me away. Anuk was already trying to swim back but the current was taking her away so fast that all you could see was her head. Chloe started to yell and wave her arms so that Florian would come rescue us but, his reaction was not quite what we expected. He just thought that she was waving so all he did was wave back and say “Hi”.

By now we knew we just had to get back to the shore no matter how far down the beach we got to the sand because, soon the whole sandbar was going to disappear. Three men saw us struggling and came into the water and let us hold onto them while they took us back to the sandbar to figure out a plan. They could stand in the water because all of them were about six feet tall. We got so lucky because they were three of the few people at the beach who were fluent in English. One guy was actually British he didn’t even know how to speak French.

At that point Florian had figured out what was going on and had jumped in the water even though he was in dry clothes to come help us back to shore.

The other three guys the beach where the highest the water went up was waist height so we got back must have know their way around this lake because they found a path back to safely. When we got back to our blanket my mom was there and so was Chloe’s and they thought that Florian had just taken us in the water made some friends and brought back the kids for some pizza and prosciutto. Long story short we had to tell them the entire thing so they would understand. As we did I watched the smiles fade off their faces and melt into looks of shock. For the next two hours Chloe and I did nothing but laugh at everything because we were in shock. Every single word any of us said triggered all of us falling onto the ground laughing.

A challenge with this piece for me was that In my all of this came from about 3 sentences in my notebook so, I didn’t really have anything to build on and I had to make it interesting.  I chose this piece because It is about some of my best friends that I have always wanted to see since they moved to Germany so it was cool to write about a memory that I had with them. The learning habit I focused was making a sentence even more interesting. Sometimes I would go back to a sentence and add scenery or sound to help it sound and be more interesting. From working on the piece I learned that you can always add more, there will never be enough to make it really interesting. I hope you liked my piece.