Hello, and welcome! My name is Donna Grooms, and I teach fourth grade at a small elementary school in the Texas Hill Country. I have taught for eleven years, and for nine of them I have done a "why story" unit every spring. Every year I say I'm going to save the children's stories somewhere besides the bottom of my filing cabinet, and this summer I finally did it.

Every family whose child's story appears here signed a permission slip, and I've used first names only. If you are one of my families and you'd like your child's story taken down, or you'd like a typo fixed, just send me an e-mail and I'll take care of it the same day.

To my 1998-99 class, if you're reading this from fifth grade: I'm proud of every one of you. Don't forget your library books are due on Fridays now. Mrs. Dykstra is stricter than I am.

What is a pourquoi tale? Pourquoi (say "poor-KWAH") is French for "why." A pourquoi tale is a story that explains why something in nature is the way it is: why the leopard has spots, why the sun and moon live in the sky, why mosquitoes buzz. People all over the world have told them for as long as there have been people, around fires and at bedtime, long before there were science books to give the other kind of answer.

What we read. We spend the first week just reading and listening. We start with Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears, Verna Aardema's retelling of a West African tale, which won the Caldecott Medal for its pictures and which my students never get tired of. Then we read some of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories out loud, and then the children choose from a big tub of folk tales from the library: stories from Africa, China, Japan, India, Mexico, the Caribbean, and from many of the native nations of North America. Each child reads at least five and fills in a "story map" for each one.

What we notice. By the end of the week, the children always figure out on their own that the stories have a lot in common. They start "long ago." Something in nature was different then. A character does something (usually something foolish, proud, brave or tricky) and that changes everything. And they end by telling you that's why things are the way they are today.

Then they write their own. Each child picks something in nature they've wondered about, plans the story on the sheet below, writes a rough draft, meets with a partner and with me for an editing conference, and writes a final copy with an illustration. We finish with an Authors' Tea, where the children read their stories aloud to their families, with punch and cookies. This year's tea was standing room only. Two dads cried. I'm not saying which ones.

We do the unit in May, after the TAAS tests are over, when everyone (including me) needs to remember that reading and writing are supposed to be fun.

Every child fills one out before starting a draft. It has four boxes:

The three things every story needed (this is the part of the rubric they all memorize):

1. A "long ago" beginning that shows how things used to be.
2. A character who causes the change by something they do, not by magic out of nowhere.
3. An "and that is why" ending that connects back to the real world today.

Beyond that, anything goes. We talk about how the best ones are also a little bit true: an armadillo really does jump straight up when it's scared, a possum really does play dead, and the cedar really does make everybody in the Hill Country sneeze all winter. The children love finding a real fact and building a "why" around it.

If you'd like a copy of my planning sheet, story map, or rubric, e-mail me and I'll send them along as a word processor file. I'm happy to trade, too. I'm always looking for new folk tales for the reading tub, especially ones from places we haven't covered yet.

A few things I've learned in nine years:

• Let them pick their own subject. The ones who pick something they've actually wondered about write the best stories.
• Animals are easier than weather or stars for most nine-year-olds. Point the stuck ones toward an animal they know well, like the family dog or cat.
• Read every story out loud at the editing conference. They hear their own run-on sentences much faster than they see them.
• Have the Authors' Tea. It's a lot of cookies. It's worth it.