Young Wordsmiths 3rd issue 2022

YOUNG WORDSMITHS Young Wordsmiths is the online magazine of Lekha Writing Center.

It is dedicated to publishing writing BY and FOR children.

FOUNDER: JYOTI YELAGALAWADI

Text Copyright by Lekha students as noted in the Lekha Anthologies published by Lekha Publishers LLC. Material in this magazine are drawn from student writings’ from

Lekha Anthologies published over the years as well as from current student writings’ from Lekha Writing Center classes and camps.

Images Used are Copyright Free and Royalty Free.

Shutterstock images have been used in this issue.

Fonts Used: Segoe Print and Baguet Script

FOUNDER’S NOTE Dear friends of Lekha, Words are powerful tools ! The Greek philosopher Plato said that those who tell the stories rule the society.

Writing can be a way to express our deepest thoughts, nurture our creative visions, express our point of view, and try to bring about transformation by changing hearts and minds. Afterall the pen is mightier then the sword.

Writing also helps to express our creativity as indicated by the amazing words spun by Lekha’s young wordsmiths. Writing done for fun and entertaining readers is fulfilling too. The biggest sense of fulfillment and accomplishment for any writer is to see their words published as a book. The process of publishing does take time even though the author may start writing for fun by jotting down the first few thoughts and ideas for a book. One such book that Lekha Publishers is about to release is “At the helm”, by young author Rithvik Iyer. Hope the readers will enjoy reading it as much as we have enjoyed the process of publishing it.

Hope you all enjoy reading this issue and continue to write for fun and write for joy.

Love, Jyoti Yelagalawadi.

Founder of Lekha Ink, Corp.

YOUNG WORDSMITHS is a quarterly magazine.

ONLINE ISSN: 2691-7912 Vol 5. No 3 Price: $2.99 EDITOR: Radhika Rajesh Raikar

If you love to write and love telling stories, then please send your submissions to the following email address:

submissions@lekhaink.com

Inside this issue…..

The White Cat Betty, a butterfly

...Page 6-11 ….Page 12

Couplets

…Page 13

The mole and the mouse

...Page 14

The porcupine and leopard

...Page 15

How to fold a paper boat

…Page 16-17

Snowball makes new friends

...Page 18-21

Supermarket mishap

...Page 22-23

Red Riding Hood

…Page 24-25

Time travel

…Page 26-27

Word games

...Page 28-29

When I saw the sea horses

...Page 30-31

Billions and billions of galaxies

...Page 32-34

Aliens probably exist

....Page 35

Trick or treat

...Page 36

Crazy couplets

...Page 37

At the Helm

...Page 38-39

Shape Story Books

THE WHITE CAT A SHAPE STORY BOOK

BY EMMY VAN HAREN, AGE 9, 2022

It was a Friday morning. The sun shone bright above the early birds. The hills towered over the horizon. Another lonely day, Waffles thought.

Waffles was a Persian cat, white and fluffy. Today was his favorite day of the year! It was the start of Black Friday.

To Waffles, it was a chance of adoption. Everyone would rush to their favorite stores to get the best deals. Waffles found out that everyone would pass through the same traffic light to get to where they needed. Waffles would rush to the traffic light to attract drivers and pedestrians.

Last year people saw him but assumed his owner left him outside when they went to the store. This year Waffles had a new plan. He was going to purr at everyone that stopped by. Maybe it would make them feel bad and give him a home. Waffles was hopeful.

He scurried out of his torn old bed that he had found in the trash. Waffles ran non-stop. He did not look back or stop. He was stressed out.

If Waffles was going to be there in time it had to be now. If he was going to leave in time it had to be thirty minutes ago. Everything was going wrong.

Finally, he stopped to see his destination in front of him. Waffles purred with delight. He made it in time!

All his thoughts of being late disappeared.

Cars honked and traffic started. It went on and on. An hour passed by and Waffles had only purred at one person. Everyone was too rushed to notice him.

Hours passed by. Traffic continued, and stores closed down. Waffles, waiting patiently was still hopeful to find an owner.

Soon the day came to an end. Waffles headed home.

Traffic stopped.

Instead of feeling sad, Waffles considered it a start. He knew that one day he would be adopted. And he would wait, hopeful, for that day to come.

BETTY– A BUTTERFLY

BY AASHNA SHETH, AGE 9, 2021 Once upon a time, there was a butterfly. Her name was Betty.

One day, she found a key and an apple. The apple had a hole in it which was the same shape as the key. She placed the key in the apple’s hole, and suddenly she went into an apple world!

Betty ate apples every day, and she lived happily ever after.

THE END

COUPLETS

BY KYLE FONG, AGE 9, 2013

The sun is high and the moon is low, Of course, it is morning when the sun likes to glow.

But then the moon goes up, and the sun goes down, Then all the lights go off in town.

Fables and their morals

THE MOLE AND THE MOUSE

BY ALLISON, 2022 One freezing winter night, Mole heard a knock at his door. He peeked out.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“It is a mouse”, said a tiny squeaky voice. “If you are kind enough will you let me spend the night?

Mole shut the door and shouted, “Oh no, I will never share my home with a mouse.

Mouse sighed and walked away.

The next few days the Mole ate heartily. He did not realize he was running out of food.

When he ran out of food, he went out. When he spotted a dark cottage, he knocked. Mouse peeked out nibbling on a piece of corn.

“Mouse will you share some of your food? I’m hungry”, asked the mole.

Mouse looked at him and shut the door leaving the mole in the dark.

MORAL Treat others the way you want to be treated.

THE CRESTED PORCUPINE AND THE GREEDY LEOPARD WRITTEN BY RHEA MAHESH, AGE 9, 2021

Once a porcupine was grazing by some water and grass in the savanna. A leopard was watching greedily from behind a bush at the porcupine.

The leopard wanted to eat the porcupine so he created a plan.

His plan was to slowly sneak upon the porcupine and then pounce on it, kill it, and eat it.

So, the leopard started to slowly sneak upon the porcupine.

Then, the leopard who was so greedy, selfish, and hungry ran to the porcupine.

The porcupine however sensed danger and turned her dangerous spikes to the leopard. The leopard who did not notice tried to bite the porcupine.

The leopard instead of getting a bite of porcupine got quills stuck to his mouth, and ran home screaming. Then the porcupine went back to grazing by some grass and water in the savanna.

MORAL Do not underestimate people. Think before you do something.

Follow the steps and build your paper boat HOW TO FOLD A PAPER BOAT

BY VIVIANA CHEN, 2016 First, you fold the paper in half the hamburger way. Then, you fold it in half again, making sure your lines are straight when you fold it. Open it. Next, fold one side to the folded line. It should be like a triangle. Do it on the other side, then, it should look like a bigger triangle.

Then, fold the bottom first flap up. Make sure you folded one. Flip it over and fold the bottom flap up. Between the flaps, there is space. Put your thumbs in that space and pull out. Then, fold it down and find the two flaps. Then, fold one of them up and flip it over and fold the other one up. There is space between them. Afterward, pull them out again. The opposite place where the space is, you hold it and pull it out. Fold it down and your boat is made!

You can put small things in it, but if you put it in water, it will get wet. Then, you will have your own boat to play with.

That’s how you fold a paper boat!

SNOWBALL MAKES NEW FRIENDS A SHAPE STORY BOOK

BY KEYA, 2022

Once there was a dog named Snowball but, everybody called him snow. His owner was named Emily but, everyone called her Emy. Snow’s goal is to make a lot of friends. But to do that Snow has to follow rules. Snow does not like to follow the rules but, he loves to make new friends. So Snow tries to follow the rules but, he kept doing..

...something wrong.

One day he followed the rules and got to go to the dog park. There he made a lot of new friends. Soon his owner Emily signed him Snow for doggy daycare. At daycare Snow made more friends. After one week Snow’s best friend was gone ! Snow did not want to go to daycare. After dinner, Snow could not sleep. The next morning Emily...

...went to work at 6:00 am. Snow did not know what to do so he started looking for his new friend. After 14 hours Emily came back home from work with a new dog. After 3 days, Snow realized that the new dog was his best friend.

Retell Reinvent Recycle

SUPERMARKET MISHAP

BY PAISLI DAVE AGE 14, 2022 Once upon a time, there was a turtle. He was an old turtle who didn’t go out of his shell much. One day the turtle went out to get groceries from the supermarket. The shy turtle walked across 5 aisles until he got to the store's back corner to get some leaves and grass for his dinner tonight.

As he walked to check out, cocky Mr. Hare came out of nowhere and cuts in front of Mr. Turtle! As shy as Mr. Turtle was, he would not let anyone get in the way of his food.

Mr. Turtle stepped towards Mr. Hare and said, “E-excuse me s-sir, umm I was here first.”

Mr. Hare whipped back and said, “Sorry turtle you are going to have to be faster than that to get first in line” Mr. turtle was enraged and yelled, “I was here first and you are going to have to be faster than that to tell me otherwise!”

“Oh yeah well, I challenge you to a race right now right outside the supermarket!” Mr. Hare replied.

Mr. Turtle spoke softly, “Okay.” shocked by what he just said and that he had agreed to this madness.

As Mr. Turtle checked out his groceries and went home to prepare, Mr. Hare was ready and waiting with the crowd forming near the start of the race. Mr. Turtle slowly came back from his home and got to the race.

As Mr. Turtle and Mr. Hare got ready at the start of the race, the crowd was becoming impatient.

Mr. Hare said, “Good Luck you are going to need it. Haha.”

Mr. Turtle was more than nervous now, he was terrified.

The race began, “3,2,1 GO!” and they were off.

Mr. Hare was going fast, he could feel the wind against his furry face. Mr. Turtle however was taking his sweet time and going at the pace he was comfortable with.

After a couple of minutes Mr. Hare realizes Mr. Turtle is nowhere to be seen so he sits down near a tree and takes a nice quick nap.

What Mr. Hare didn’t know is that this nap was about an hour long. An hour was enough time for Mr. Turtle to be close enough to the finish line that the people started to cheer waking Mr. Hare up!

Mr. Hare rushed to the finish line but didn’t make it on time. Mr. Turtle had won the race!

Mr. Hare was upset but surprised and spoke “Good job Mr. Turtle, I guess slow and steady really does win the race.”

RED RIDING HOOD A RETELLING BY THAIS YABAR, 2016 Once upon a time, there was a girl named Red Riding Hood. One day, she decided to go visit her grandma. Before she had left, her mother had told her to not talk to any strangers or stop along the way because she could get lost.

Along the way though, she came across a beautiful field of flowers.

She forgot what her mother had said. Red Riding Hood stopped to pick up some flowers for her grandmother.

Afterwards, she continued on her way. The only problem was she forget what direction she was supposed to go in. She ended up walking in a circle.

Right when she was about to start off in another direction, she saw a wolf. The wolf was approaching her in a friendly manner.

The wolf saw that she was scared and decided to give a gift to show that he was kind. He started to walk away and Red Riding Hood started to wonder what he was doing.

A few minutes later, he came back, carrying a daisy chain. He handed it to her. Red Riding Hood received it kindly.

She said, “Thank you.”

She was no longer scared. She explained to the wolf that she was lost and needed to get to her grandma’s house. The wolf told her not to worry. He knew exactly where her house was because he had passed it many times.

A couple of minutes later, they were at her grandma’s house. They said, goodbye, and then the wolf ran off into the woods. Right after the wolf left, Red Riding Hood knocked on the door. When her grandma answered, she was very delighted to see Red Riding Hood.

They had a nice little picnic and, after that, Red Riding Hood went home.

TIME TRAVEL STORY AND ILLUSTRATION BY CHEYENNE JANISCH, AGE 8, 2014 David was a scientist in his lab room. He was trying to make a time machine. David wanted to travel time his whole life. David sighed.

“I’ll try again tomorrow.”

That night, he dreamt of traveling through time.

The next morning, David tried to make a time machine again.

This time it worked! “Hurray!” “Yes.” David actually did it.

He traveled through time all night. He was having so much fun that he didn’t notice that he was running out of gas.

Lost, he traveled to an island. Was he in the middle to Bermuda Triangle?! Or used to be, now stuck there until he got enough gas to get home.

He traveled to his house except he saw someone familiar. It was himself. He had traveled through the wrong time period! Once he got to the right time period, he felt happy to be home.

Time Travel

Based on the book At the Helm U.S. Presidents

Winter Flowers

WHEN I SAW THE SEA HORSES

BY GWYNN CHIO, AGE 8, 2013 It seemed like I was in a dream, but this was real. When I was in Hawaii last year to celebrate my 8th birthday, I got to touch sea horses at a sea horse farm.

When my mom and I arrived there, the place looked like an old barn. But my mom told me that we were at the only sea horse farm in the world.

‘Wow, really,’ I remember thinking to myself. I was curious and couldn’t wait to enter the place. I soon learned sea horses eat shrimp. I got to hold a cup before passing it down to my sister Maylin. She said it was amazing. After that we got to see and feed the sea horses.

I was wondering what I was going to see next. I got my answer soon enough as I saw orange, red and yellow-colored sea horses.

But the rarest one I saw was the dragon sea horse; there are only six of them left in the entire world, and most of them are found in Australia.

After that, I got to hold them at last. I was feeling a bit nervous until I held one, and it tickled. After that, we went to the gift shop, where I got a necklace and earrings.

Another wonderful thing we did in Hawaii was spend time at the beach. When I got there, I saw fish, big rocks, crabs and shells.

The water was so calm that I asked my mom how come the waves were that way. She said it was because the current was weak. As we were talking, Maylin began splashing and walking deeper in the water. I yelled for her to stop. My mom said it was OK because she had extra clothes on.

Then I jumped in with her and immediately saw some fish. I tried to catch one, but it swam away. Spending time in Hawaii for my birthday was a memorable trip I’ll never forget.

BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF GALAXIES

BY RHEA SAINI, AGE 14, 2014 Aliens? Extra-Terrestrial life? SETI? All of these terms have been scoffed at since the beginning of time. When we imagine aliens, we come up with sickly-hued creatures, speaking in foreign jargons, and living on Mars. However, that is not always true.

The reason aliens exist is because it would be so narrow-minded to think they don’t. The reasons we can’t reach other life is because of the number of galaxies, the amount of light-years it takes, and the lack of technological advancement. We should fund research so that NASA can make new programs and develop new machinery.

One of the reasons it is difficult to find foreign life is the amount of light-years it takes to reach the end of our galaxy. Imagine how long it’d take to explore all those hundreds of billions of galaxies. By the time we end up making ET contact, our Earth will have either evolved immensely or fizzled into a crumpled heap of mass from the sun.

Astronomy itself doesn’t strike me as a true science. I do agree it is an interesting topic to research; however, the subject of astronomy is simply objective guesses or opinions based on some supporting facts. We never truly will know how the moon became, whether it was a chunk taken off of Earth which explains its iron content, or whether it was a heap of space rock that god sucked into Earth’s gravity.

Pursuing this further, as far out as we search for foreign life, the more we are obscured by light-years and darkness. Even if we managed to travel in light-years our Earth would have evolved greatly. When you travel in light-years time passes by more quickly. Another example is when you are in an airplane: in the air you are aging microscopically faster than those on land.

Mars is one of the closest planets to Earth (aside from Venus). However, getting from Earth to Mars would take 6-8 months. The planet of Mars is approximately 35 million miles from Earth, not even close to being light-years away. Imagine how long it would take to reach somewhere one light-year away.

A light-year in Earth’s distance is nearly 6 trillion miles, and the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years long. That’s 600,000,000,000,000,000 miles (or 600 quadrillion miles away) just to explore our galaxy.

So far, during our time on Earth, we have never had any connection with other life. The reason for this is that before the twentieth century astronomy was only observational.

Observational astronomy was what the Greeks, Chinese, Indians, Mayans, Babylonians, and Iranians studied. By observing and charting the night sky, the older civilizations learned astronomy. Until the invention of the telescope, astronomy was not fully considered a modern or theoretical science.

Most believed Galileo discovered the telescope. But it was in fact HansLippershey, a Dutch-German lens-maker, who made the first telescope in 1608. Strictly speaking, modern science astronomy was not developed until the early 1600’s. We’ve only had approximately 400 years to learn everything we know about astronomy, from then until today.

Given how little time we had to look for outside life, so far we are doing quite a good job. On the contrary, if we have been striving on Earth for thousands of centuries, there must be a race that is more advanced than us and has been around longer. If they haven’t found us yet, maybe the concept of ET is a hoax that is simply an insignificant flame travelling around, waiting to be ridiculed and stamped out.

Like I said before, “Astronomy is simply objective guesses or opinions based on some supporting facts.” However, until that flame is blown out, I refuse to believe that alien life is simply a myth.

Who knows, maybe somewhere trillions of light-years away there is another race, living in different conditions, and looking up into the universe wondering, curiously, if anything else is out there.

In conclusion, we should fund research so that NASA can make more scientific breakthroughs and develop new programs and machinery.

Some of the few reasons we can’t reach other galaxies is because of the number of galaxies, the amount of light-years it would take, and the lack of technological advancements.

So the next time you look at the night sky, just remember that there are nearly 500 billion galaxies in the universe. Many of which could house suitable living conditions for other life forms, different from ours.

All it takes is a small donation on your part and soon one day we could find ourselves with neighbors only a few light-years away.

ALIENS PROBABLY EXIST

BY SAM HORTON, AGE 11, 2014 How selfish is it that people think we are the only ones in the universe? Well, I think there is life in the universe somewhere. If there are over billions of galaxies in the universe, life is bound to exist.

I know that many planets could be without atmosphere, because space the beings. Maybe beings outside of and breathe something else. Maybe out into the universe yet.

habitable, except for the ones would suck everything out of Earth exist, without oxygen we just have not looked far

I have noticed a particular part in a book by Ray Bradbury. In his book, he wrote about Martians thinking there could be life on Earth. They quickly dismissed it, thinking that there was too much oxygen on that planet for life to survive. Many people on Earth think that there could only be life with oxygen. I think that is incorrect, and life can evolve for their planet’s environment.

Single-celled life may be scarce on some planets, but can evolve into multi-celled organisms. Like dinosaurs, present-day beings have evolved from tiny microorganisms. Even if some beings have evolved from multi-celled organisms, they all come from bacteria.

Although, if we did find microbial life on other planets, we would have to wait thousands of years until it has evolved into multicelled organisms.

In that time of waiting for the extraterrestrial bacteria to evolve, humans would evolve greatly like the ape-like creatures to Homo sapiens! The difference is we would evolve from Homo sapiens into something else. Our technology would advance, and we would have colonized other planets. Earth would have been burnt to cinders by the sun. We might even find the evolved microbial life.

I believe that extraterrestrial life could exist. If the universe is so large, and microbial life exists, extraterrestrials may exist or are growing from single-celled organisms.

TRICK OR TREAT

BY ROHAN KOKJE, AGE 9, 2021 Trick or Treat

Please do cheat If you cheat You’ll get a treat

CRAZY COUPLETS

BY DERRICK KAI, AGE 10,2014

There once was a fox named Socks Who lived in a really big box.

He wanted some food But he wasn’t in the mood.

So he told his buddies To give him some munchies.

In a representative democracy, your vote is your voice. One of the most important choices any citizen can be involved in is the choice of who should be the president.

Read all about the presidents of the USA, as you flip through the pages of "At the Helm," by Rithvik Iyer. You will discover more about their positions, idiosyncrasies, legacies, and much more.

WWW.RITHVIKIYER.COM