Days of Our Lives

It was a spur of the moment thing and for this one I have to admit that I kinda of, well, okay, I practically commanded S to enter it; the Mexican Wolves Essay Contest.

She loves animals and anything to do with preservation, and this seemed to be such a great opportunity for her. But yeah, I told her to write that essay (which I justified as part of her writing in homeschooling – phew! now another type of writing is covered for this year-> persuasive essay) and enter it in the contest. She didn’t really want to, but I explained the reasons why I think it was a good idea. It was a delicate judgment call on my part, balancing between respecting my children’s wishes/interests/wants and outright telling them to do something even if they don’t feel like it. I don’t really believe in pushing them to do something they don’t really want to do or like to do, but at some point, parents do kind of know best, though I have to admit I feel a bit lousy doing this to her. Well, I guess I’ll justify it by it being part of her writing assignment.

So she spent weeks writing this essay, researching it, making the outline, showing it to me, figuring out the subtopics, showing them to me, writing them down, showing them to me. One of her paragraphs was actually pretty good, and when I told her so, she had this reaction of,

“Are you kidding me?”

But seriously, it was good.

She complained that she didn’t like ‘thinking’. On writing, she doesn’t like the ‘thinking’ part, but she likes reading her writing after she was done with it. As I was reading Your Child’s Strengths by Jenifer Fox, I asked her what she liked about writing. After my ‘interview’ session with her, which she doesn’t really like by the way, it turned out that she likes to work in a team.

For Sunday school, they had to pair up and write about Hajj to send to the newspaper, and S said she enjoyed that because she didn’t have to do it herself. She also like the editing part of writing. That gave me some valuable insights. I love reading. I really do. It opens up worlds.

So, she finally did finish this essay, which both hubs and I critiqued and help edit. By the end of it all, S was just so sick and tired of even hearing the phrase, ‘Mexican Wolves’. They’re going to have an award giving event next week, but we won’t be in town for it (which is pretty nice because the event is held at the theatre and I’d really rather not be there). If  S places anything they’ll contact her. If not, she gets an exercise in writing a persuasive essay. A win win inshaallah.