It's Writing Olympics Time!

Last week we did our annual Peace Corps English writing competition "Writing Olympics."  Basically we get kids grades 6-11 (and university students, but I don't teach university) and give them a few questions to choose from.  They write essays that are judged first nationally in Azerbaijan and then we send the winners to the international round (which includes Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova...and I think a few other countries).

The main criteria for the essays is creativity, which is very difficult for my students.  No matter how hard I tried to help them write more exciting essays during our practice writing activities, I got the same boring essays from all of my students.  Usually they write something about helping poor people because, as I found, they can make anything about how you should help poor people (I guess that's a message that is really drilled into them).  Finally, in one of our last practice sessions, I finally got an interesting essay from one of my kids.  I had given my 6th grade students the start of a story about a magic, blue cat named Joe and they had to finish the story.  While they were writing, one of my students randomly asked me to translate "bığ" which in English is "mustache."  Hearing this, another student decided to use the word mustache in his essay and wrote some strange story about how the cat magician stole a man's mustache and gave it to another guy.  The mustache then became gold and the man was never poor again.  While it was a totally bizarre story and still talked about helping poor people, I was really excited that it wasn't just the same old stuff as everyone else.  With this in mind, on the day of the competition, I gave my students a list of words from the 6th grade textbook that I thought were semi-interesting.  I figured that maybe if they had interesting words in their heads they would write an interesting essay (makes sense right?).  When I gave them the list I reminded them about the mustache story and how different it was…  Here is one of the results (a few spelling mistakes corrected), answering the question "Which would you rather be, a bird or a fish? Why?":

I want a bird.  I fly on the sky. I stole everything. I want a bird and I eat a reindeer.  Reindeer is very sweet.  I fry reindeer.  I want a bird and I eat people.  The people die me.  The people fry me.  The people eat me.  I carve to the people.  I go to my bird’s home.  The people call magician.  Magician made me carve my nose.  I gave to magician my nose.  Magician gave my nose to the people.  The people are very rich.

Can you guess which word was on my list?  And which other vocabulary words from this year the student remembered on his own that were entirely inapplicable?

My word: reindeer

Other vocabulary words: to fry, to carve, magician

So I didn't exactly get the winning story I was hoping for, but I at least got a kick out of the randomness of this essay!