Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: Valentine (05/16/05)
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TITLE: Vicks Jars and Color Crayons | Previous Challenge Entry
By Alice Lewis
05/19/05 -
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We had just immigrated from Germany six weeks earlier. My grasp of the English language was still very limited. But I tried very hard to follow everything that was happening in my fourth grade class-room.
Mrs. Gamm handed out sheets of white, lightweight construction paper that had mimeographed hearts of various sizes on them. I took a cue from my classmates as to what to do next. They took out their color crayons and began to color those hearts. So did I.
I reached into my desk and took mine out. I carefully opened up my pack of eight Crayola crayons and sniffed the pleasant scent. I liked all the beautiful colors standing in a row, seemingly smiling at me, waiting to do my bidding. These were the first color crayons that I ever owned. I felt that they were a precious possession and needed to be carefully handled. I didn’t want the package to get damaged looking, nor the crayons.
I took out my red crayon and carefully laid it down on its slanted side. I put my thumb-nail on the outer edge of the heart and colored only up to my thumb. The thumb acted as an automatic stop so I would not go over the edge. I always used only the slanted side of my crayons. Then I would turn it a little to use a different side. That way I always kept a nice point on my crayons.
I wished that I had a box of 24 or 48 crayons like some of the kids did. But I learned how to make more colors by the way I used my crayons. On my next heart, after I had lightly colored it red, so light that a lot of white still showed, I used blue next and found that I had a purple-red heart. When I was done coloring all the hearts this way, the other kids who had more crayons in their boxes were amazed at all the colors I had created, colors that weren’t in my box. They were jealous. I was pleased.
Next we had to cut our hearts out and paste them onto shoeboxes. Those were our valentine boxes. I finally had a blue paste jar just like all the other kids did. I told my uncle, who was an American citizen, that all the kids had blue jars. I wanted one too. The teacher would fill those with library paste from her big gallon jar whenever a kid needed more paste. He figured out that those blue jars were originally from Vicks Vapo-rub, so he got me one. Fitting in. That’s what I was trying to do. He also gave me some Valentine cards to give to my friends.
The day finally came. We got cake for afternoon desert when usually we did not eat in the afternoon. After that we each took our boxes from the window sill to see how many valentine cards we got. I was so surprised at the amount of cards in my box.
"These kids like me!"
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