[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.
Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
If you grew up an only child, you may not understand the loss of a good night’s sleep or the impossibility of privacy you’d have experienced with siblings – for they would surely have robbed you of these personal necessities many times over. With a perfect rhyming scheme and plenty of good-natured humor, this week’s fourth-grade Middlebury poet Toby Baker-Rouse describes the five family disturbances he encounters on a simple weekday morning before school.
Today The Baby Crawled on Me
By Toby Baker-Rouse, 9
[T]oday the baby crawled on me,
with kisses and with drool.
My mother brought him up the stairs
to get me up for school.
Today, the dog, she jumped on me –
she sat upon my head.
My mother brought her up the stairs
to get me out of bed.
Today my sister woke me up,
with stomping and a yell.
She thumped her way down all the stairs,
louder than alarm bells.
Today my brother jumped on me,
and my blankets he did take.
My mother sent him up the stairs
to see I was awake.
Today my mother sang to me,
as she is apt to do.
It was very loud and all off-key,
but got me up for school.
Today nobody woke me up;
I slept till almost noon.
I wore pajamas, read, and played –
but Monday comes too soon.
