One day a cat was playing in its back yard.
A dog saw the cat and started chaseing after it. They chased eachoter all over town.
The cat did not get tired and the dog did get tired and the cat ran all the way home safe and sound!
The END.
By Moira, age 6
(Mama added paragraph breaks, but flawless punctuation and terrifically cute spelling errors are the author's own.)
What did we learn today, class?
Besides the fact that cat rule, we learned that all good stories have a beginning, middle, and an end.
The status quo (playing cat) is disrupted by conflict (dog appears on the scene), rising action (the chase!) takes you to a climax (cat triumphs) and a satisfying resolution (home again).
Next time you worry that you're not a storyteller, remember that you wrote the perfect stories when you were in first grade.