5th Grade Writing Assessment.

Along with all of the other joys of 5th grade, there is also a writing assessment. You don’t HAVE to pass it to move to 6th grade, but it’s very important. Moon HATES writing. Let’s put it this way, when it comes to essays, Moon has a great future on twitter. JD and I have tried helping her, but whenever we gather around the table to talk about it, she’s like this:

Which is really fun as you can imagine. After about an hour of that, JD and I are like this:

It’s not pretty. Which is why I LOVE her tutor, Emily. She came this weekend to spend an hour helping Moon get the grasp of the whole writing thing. Moon didn’t freak out in front of her, but she didn’t exactly rise to the challenge. After the first two drafts, Emily was like this:

When it was time to go, she took a sheet of paper and wrote out a detailed list for Moon. “On the first 5 lines, write who, what, where, etc. On the next 4, the first thing that happened.”And so on and so on until she had 42 lines written out. She made Moon promise to do it that night, and then I was to call her when it was over. Moon smiled and said, “Yes, Ma’am.” Then Emily left.

After a couple of hours of rest, I had Moon sit down at the table and begin. After scratching out 3 lines, she was like:

But I had learned my lesson! This time, I was all:

My sister, Tania-the-mad, called about that time and I told Moon that when I got off the phone, I was going to check how far she’d gotten and I wanted to be surprised. It was like a light bulb went off! Next thing you know she’s writing like the wind. By the time I got off the phone, she was over half way finished. She couldn’t wait to read it to me. Another 10 minutes and she was done. And it was good! JD and I made a big deal out of it and she was like:

And JD and I were like this:

Whew. Everyone was MUCH happier. Even Ryan was like this:

Okay, Ryan wasn’t actually there, but after that fiasco I need a little eye-candy.