Daisy's Defining Day
To my mentor and first editor, Sheila Barry, who believed in
Daisy
from the start and made all my words better â S.V.F.
For sweet Sadie and happy Holly â S.M.
Daisy liked knowing all the words to a song and singing them loudly while she danced around the house. She liked making cookies and using at least three different colors of frosting to decorate them. She liked making friendship bracelets with her best friend, Emma, and swearing to Emma that she would never take hers off.
Daisy especially liked riding her bike to the library to check out books. Books were full of words. And even more than making cookies or singing loudly, Daisy loved words. She kept track of her favorite words in a green notebook covered with purple polka dots.
On this particular day, Daisy carried her notebook in her backpack on the way to school. Now that it was early spring, Daisy and Emma often walked with their neighbor, Samantha. They used to try to avoid Samantha because she had only wanted to use words like
stop
and
mine
. But now Samantha was a lot more fun.
The only problem was that walking with Samantha also meant walking with Samantha's younger brother, Grant. He and his friends used words like
smelly
and
gross
. Usually, the girls didn't pay much attention to Grant, but today, Daisy found herself listening to his conversation.
“We learned about rhymes yesterday,” he said.
Daisy thought about her list of
Favorite Rhyming Words
.
Sweet
and
treat
were on it, as were
sun
and
fun
. Daisy was just about to share one of her favorite rhymes when Grant shared one of his.
“Sister blister,” he said, sticking his tongue out at Samantha.
“That's not very nice,” Daisy said. Grant looked at Daisy, and then a not-so-nice smile spread across his face. “Lazy Daisy,” he said.
“Don't listen to him,” Samantha advised. “I never do.”
Daisy tried, but soon Grant and all his friends were chanting, “Lazy Daisy!” Luckily, they were distracted by a trail of ants crossing the sidewalk. “Grant the Ant,” Daisy thought to herself, but swallowed the words before they came out. By the time they got to the school playground, Grant seemed to have forgotten about his new nickname for Daisy. But just before he headed to his classroom, he yelled, “Bye, Lazy Daisy!” in such a loud voice that many of the older kids turned and looked at her. Samantha mouthed, “Sorry,” to Daisy as they walked into Room 8.
Daisy put her green notebook with the purple polka dots away in her desk and sat down. But she kept thinking about Grant's chant.
What if everyone in the whole school started calling her Lazy Daisy?
There was only one word that could describe how she would feel then â
miserable
.
Daisy didn't have too much time to worry, because it was a demanding day for the students in Room 8. They had to write a story using all their spelling words from the last week, and then they had a math test on fractions. After the test, fractions were filling Daisy's head so completely that she couldn't think a whole thought. And Daisy wasn't alone. All the students looked as though their heads were a little too full.
So Miss Goldner, the best teacher in the world, put her hands on her hips and said, “You know what we need right now? A dance break! But this time, we're going to add a twist.” Daisy and Emma wondered what kind of a twist. Would she teach them a pretzel dance? Would she make them hold hands, get all tangled up, and then try to untangle themselves without letting go of each other's hands? But Miss Goldner didn't say anything more. She just walked to the CD player and pushed a button. When “The Twist” came on, Miss Goldner demonstrated for the class. Pretty soon, everyone in Room 8 was giggling and twisting to the beat.
After the dance break, Miss Goldner gave each student a blank piece of paper.
“We're going to have some fun writing sentences about animals. But the
twist
here is going to be that all the words in the sentence have to start with the same letter or sound as the animal's name,” Miss Goldner said. “That's called alliteration. Let's have fun with all the letters, starting with
A.
For instance, you might write âAngry Alligators Ate Apples' or âBossy Beavers Bit Bark.'”
Daisy thought the animal sentences were fabulous! She started with “Awesome Antelopes Are Athletic” and was all the way to “Handy Hippos Hammer Houses” when the bell rang signaling the end of the day.
Emma and Daisy talked about the assignment all the way home. “I love how the words sound together,” Daisy said, sharing her favorite sentence of the day. “Elegant Elephants Eagerly Eat Ãclairs.” Daisy couldn't wait to enter the animal sentences into her notebook.
