Pirates Are Mean: A Dictation

Last night, I found, on the dining room table, a strip of easel paper with some rather elegant, adult-and-probably-female-generated block print in an orange pastelly mode (or perhaps well-sharpened crayon). In spite of the text clearly having been rendered by a woman, it was very obvious where the language itself originated, more specifically a five-year-old boy. The first clue was that the entire text concerned pirates. I eventually found out that this was a project undertaken by the children's very attentive babysitter, Katie, and that she had decided to function as stenographer to Daniel's ongoing creative play with his miniature pirate action-figures. The drama goes as follows:

Pirates are mean, and some pirates have swords in their mouths. Pirates have swords in their hands, too. The pirate is gone to his pirate's castle, and he doesn't notice that he's going to jail.* They are walking behind each other, and they fall in. They start to fight, "No, you did..."

Pirates have horses and ships. A knight opens jail and the pirates get out. Then they get their heads chopped off by the knight, and he throws the pirates in the water.**

*When I was reading the script out loud, Daniel clarified, without prompting, that the pirates are actually walking backwards. This seems to explain how they could inadvertently go to jail.

**I had to ask this question: Were the pirates actually dead at the end of all this head-lopping and body-jettisoning. Daniel said that no, they were still alive. I wasn't completely surprised that they survived this ordeal.

(December 15, 2010)