I heard the following award-winning essays read by their authors at the Illinois Reads 2017 launch in Bloomington, IL , on March 11, 2017. They made me want to start writing children's fiction! Enjoy!
For as long as I can remember, I've loved reading! I read almost every day and my parents have told me that when I was three years old, I announced that I wanted to write books. That has never changed.
When I was a baby and a toddler, my mom rocked me and read stories to me and a book that I will never forget is Honey, Honey, Lion by Jan Brett. One day I memorized it so well that I read it back to my parents. It is a book that will stay in my mind forever. When I was five, my dad read The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis to me, which I understood pretty well, I loved those books because they were exciting with battles, good against evil! In the summer of 2016, when I was nine going on ten and my younger sister was seven going on eight, we read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling with our dad. I loved that book so much! I had been dying to read the Harry Potter books, and as soon as I read the first chapter, I knew I was in for a treat. At first, things were looking bad for Harry and his life with the Dursleys, but I was so excited for him when he got his letter asking him to come to Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry! Now we are on the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
While we read that book with our dad, we read another book with our mom, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'engle, which we are almost done with. I also love that book. It is exciting and adventurous, following fifteen year-old Meg Murry whose world is turned upside down as soon as a stranger knocks on the door and says something very peculiar. Another book I enjoyed thoroughly is Upside Down Magic by Sarah Minyowski, Laren Myracle and Emily Jenkins, about fifth grader Nory Horace, whose magic is very wonky. Her strict father sends her to live with her Aunt Margo to go to Dunwiddle Magic School, which has a program for kids like her. She soon finds not only friends in the Upside Down Magic class, but excitement, love, and comfort. The book encourages kids to embrace who they are.
I think if anyone reads good books that are worthy to be read, they will become pretty smart. I feel like I've learned so much from reading so many books. My favorite author is J.K. Rowling and my two favorite books right now are Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and A Wrinkle in Time. This had led me to a love of writing. Sometimes I even write fan fiction about characters in books, movies and television shows, but I mostly write stories of my own. Reading is very important to me. I honestly don't know what I would do without books!
--Daisy, age 10
Reading is one of my favorite things to do! There are so many books you can read and I love to read because you start to feel like you've stepped into an adventure when it's a really good book. But when I was really little, I never started to read myself until I was about four or five years old.
I have always loved penguins my whole life, and I didn't see too many good books about them. But one day when I was out with my friend and my sister for my birthday party, my friend gave me this book called Mr. Popper's Penguins. I saw that it was twenty chapters and got a little nervous about how long it would take me to read it, but then I discovered that it was one of the best books I had ever read! Even when I had only read the first page, I fell in love with the book. The book is by Richard and Florence Atwater. Now I think they are two of my favorite authors. The reason I fell in love with the book was because just on the second chapter, they started to talk about penguins! When I read the first sentence, boom! I knew this was going to turn into one of my favorite books!
But Mr. Popper's Penguins isn't the only book I love. Another one of my favorite authors is Ellen Miles. She wrote another one of my favorite books, Teddy. Teddy is in The Puppy Place series. The Puppy Place series is about a girl and a boy that foster puppies until they can find the forever home for them. It's a very fun book series for me because I love dogs. They are my second favorite animal after penguins. In the series, the two kids want to get a puppy of their own so in almost every book, they are asking their mom for a puppy saying, "Please? We'll take super good care of it!"
So I just think these are really cute books and I hope there are so many more books out there I didn't read that are as good as these so I might read them. Good stories mean extra fun! Right? I just wish every story in the world was as good as Mr. Popper's Penguins and The Puppy Place series. But that's the fun thing, you get to try new books! They might not be very good, or they could be one of the best books ever! So I hope you liked my essay!
--Ivy, age eight.
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