Five Unusual Objects

About the Book

4th grade students in Colorado wrote these stories over the course of six months. Students were given an assignment to write a 6,000-word story about an unusual object and what happens when someone finds that object. Each story should have six to seven chapters, which consist of about 1,000 words. Rod Serling's original Twilight Zone stories were the inspiration for these tales from another dimension. Our ultimate goal was to create a plot that flows from one chapter to the next and follows the discovery and disposal of an object that has some magical properties. My goal, as the teacher, was to develop an assignment where writing concepts would be encountered as they came up in the context of a meaningful project.

I am extremely proud of my students. Their dedication to this project has more than advanced them to the next grade level; it has made them published authors before the age of eleven. Please excuse their errors and envy their ingenuity because they enjoyed writing these 'short' stories more than filling out worksheets, studying weekly spelling words, and practicing for standardized tests.

About the Author

Elliott Boyer, Chris Castanon, Stephanie Gerganoff, Ruthie Hinman, Sierra Horecky, Brinna Sales, Ian Smith, Hava Rosenberg, Jacob Vaughn, Sarah Wachs, and Wyatt Wicks were students in Mr. McCarthy?s 4th Grade class at Ralston Elementary in Golden, Colorado.