Today, and next week, the Grade 5s and 6s will be working on a creative writing activity where they imagine they are trapped in a snow globe. Students will have to explain how they became trapped in a snow globe, what it is like in the snow globe, and how they can be rescued.
Click for Ms. Crutchfield’s Example:
Help! I’m a New Yorker Trapped in a Snow Globe!
The streets of New York were crowded with hot dog carts and newspaper stands. The slushy December sidewalks had soaked through my fashionably ill-equipped-for-cold boots, and my eco-friendly shopping bag from Macy’s was about to rip because my purchases were too heavy for the flimsy paper to hold.
I wanted to cry, to sit down and rest, to have someone give me a hot chocolate and a teddy bear and tell me it was all going to be ok – but none of those things happened. Instead, a tiny old man bumped my arm, causing me to spill the contents of my purse all over the winter sidewalk.
“Watch where you are going, Old Man!” I screamed in my most un-Christmaslike voice.
The old man turned to me and, with a twinkle in his eye, waved his hand in what appeared to be a friendly hello . . . or goodbye! I suddenly felt dizzy, the world spun away from me and the ground got smaller as I lifted up from the ground and a bit to the right, through a shop window and into the snowglobes of the New York skyline displayed there.
Life in the snowglobe is wet and cold. I find I can breathe, despite the liquid gel that holds the fake snow and glitter suspended when shaken. The shaking is the worst part. When a child comes along to shake all the snow globes on the shelf at the store, my body spins round and round as if I have been thrown into a laundry machine. The child often sees me, now a flat, two-dimensional piece of plastic, floating around. I have once or twice heard a parent remark that they thought it strange that the snowglobes had people mixed in with the confetti.
For two Christmases I have swirled around this chilly plastic world, and each Christmas, right at sunset, the old man walks by and gives me a wink. This year, I need you, whoever you are, to wait outside the Kitsch and Karry store on 5th Avenue at sunset on Christmas and beg the old man to let me out. PLEASE, before someone buys this snowglobe and I am doomed forever to sit on a shelf of a stranger’s home and watch them live the life I would have had if I had just been a bit nicer and less of a Scrooge.