Editor’s note: Young Writers Project, a Vermont nonprofit dedicated to helping students write well, will be sharing several exceptional pieces of best student work each week at VTDigger.org for special display over the weekend. We hope you appreciate the young writers’ viewpoints, imagination and experiences. Please let us know what you think.
This piece was written in response to the prompt, Gift: Write about something you cherish. Cole Banks wrote this about his family in the last school year as a fourth-grader at Tunbridge Central School. Cole says his parents like to tell stories about their families, and this story is about his mother’s family. “I’m very proud of them,” he says.
The Power of Family
By Cole Banks,
a fifth-grader to be at Tunbridge Central School
The greatest gift that I have in my life is my family.
I love my life because it has so many good things in it.
I have a very big and nice family. I am very proud of my ancestors, too.
My grandfather was one of the first African Americans to integrate the Marine Corps. His name was Ernest Smith Jr.
Ernest’s brother was a middle-weight boxing champion of the world. His name was Harry Smith.
I have had a lot of fun with my cousins in the past and I definitely will in the future.
About YWP
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in 19 newspapers across Vermont and in parts of New Hampshire and on Vermont Public Radio. It runs an online teen writing community, youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: be respectful. It works with teachers in 63 schools who use YWP’s unique, free digital classroom platform and provides many with ongoing professional development mentoring and other teacher training. And it is developing NxN, a writing center at its Burlington headquarters. For more, go to youngwritersproject.org or ywpschools.net.
If you are a youth or you know a youth who is passionate about something and works hard at it, be it building models or flying or playing the drums or climbing cliffs, please contact Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org and tell him something about the youth and how to get in touch with her or him.
