They Came, They Saw, They Bugged Out

They Came, They Saw, They Bugged OUT

BY THE LOUD AND PROUD KIDS OF DIVISION 2

Copyright © 2018 The Writers’ Exchange This book was created by Division 2, Ms. Koch’s grade 4–6 class, at Xpey’ Elementary in the spring of 2018.

207–877 East Hastings Vancouver, BC V6A 1R8 vancouverWE.com

The Writers’ Exchange gets innercity kids excited about reading, writing and their own potential through mentoring and creative projects like this chapbook. All Writers’ Exchange programs are free for the children and families we serve, so we could not exist without the support of amazing donors, including Social Venture Partners Vancouver, Marily Mearns, Linda Louis, the Waterbury Foundation, Megan Abbott, the City of Vancouver, Sasamat Foundation,TELUS, British Columbia Arts Council, Richard and Suzanne Cole, Bernard MacLeod, Nancy and Ted Maitland, BPS Wealth Management at CIBC Wood Gundy, John and Nina Cassils, Judy Gale, Lynn and Gene Gerwing, the Grayross Foundation held at the Vancouver Foundation, Lindsay Mearns, the Edith Lando Charitable Foundation, Pep and Bev Lough, Mark Tindle and Leslie Cliff, the Wolrige Foundation and the Van Tel/ Safeway Credit Union Legacy Fund, and CLICK (Contributing to Lives of Inner City Kids Society).Thank you.

Please join us in acknowledging that we live, work, learn and play on the traditional lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and TsleilWaututh Coast Salish people.

Writers’ Exchange mentors: Barbara, Jane, Jarin, Josephine, Kathryn, Randy, Rebecca and Sarah Design and layout: Maddalena Aliprandi, marameolab.net Production coordination and editing: Melissa Edwards Creative lead: Taylor Richardson

THE WOLRIGE FOUNDATION VAN TEL/SAFEWAY CREDIT UNION LEGACY FUND

generously donated the printing of this chapbook.

support Writers’ Exchange in-school projects.

THEY CAME, THEY SAW, THEY BUGGED OUT

Introduction Welcome to our book of bug hotels! We made terrariums with different types of plants in them, then we decorated them and built hotels so that bugs could come and live in them.

Then we wrote stories about the bugs! We hope you like our book.

CONTENTS 6

10

Silk

By Cailyn

Bugs Take over the World

By Arwen

7

11

Newborn Birds

By Semiah

Raine’s Bug Hotel

By Raine

8

12

The Green Kid

By Alannah

Eight-Legged Freaks

By Ava

9 The Student Insects of Division 2

By Sky

13

16

Vines Attack

By Niobe

My Terrarium

By Nolan

14

17

Planta

By Emma

Tell Me Your Name

By Christopher

15

18

I Hate Bugs

By Kenyon

Draw your own...

Terrarium Bug Hotel

SILK One day in a very far away corner of China, a nameless silkworm found himself a sewing machine. He didn’t know what it was, so he tried out all the buttons. He saw some fabric, and so he took the fabric and went to the sewing machine. He tried to sew a tiny bag, then he started sewing other things. Then he began to sew every day.

B

y

Ca il

yn 6

NEWBORN BIRDS Newborn birds are (spoiler) little bags of flesh with a beak‌ The birds see glass and so they go into the terrarium and into the plants and find the bug hotel. But then the sun gets covered by clouds. Then the sun shines again and they go out and go home and take a nap to get better from banging their head against the glass!

B

y

Se mia

h 7

THE GREEN KID A kid wakes up early in the morning and he has salad for breakfast. The next day he notices he is slowly turning green like a plant. A few hours later he has totally turned into a flower. And then he hops down the hill like a bunny, and while everybody is out he put seeds in their food. Within a few days everyone is a plant.

By

Al an na

h 8

THE STUDENT INSECTS OF DIVISION 2 It was a cloudy, dark day in Vancouver. The storm came along, and then thunder and lightning came along, and then there was a cloudburst full of bugs and creatures. There were ants, worms and maggots falling all over the school grounds. Then all the maggots ate all the food and the worms were eating the soil.

All the food was on the playground and thousands of maggots were there. Liz was the Queen of the Ants, and she decided that they should go to war. The ants beat the maggots, and after that there was a party with ice cream and popsicles and cake.

B

y

Sk y 9

BUGS TAKE OVER THE WORLD One day I saw on the news that they had made caterpillars as big as horses. The caterpillars had broken out and were making the whole city into a cocoon, and 10,000,000,000,000 people had been turned into caterpillars. I was so scared. But I woke up and it was just a bad dream.

B

y

Ar wen 10

RAINE’S BUG HOTEL I created this for fun. The hotel is going to be outside so that it is in the bugs’ natural habitat. This is a place where caterpillars can come and build their cocoons to become butterflies.

B

y

Ra i

ne 11

EIGHT-LEGGED FREAKS Wandering spiders are scary when they’re small, but imagine them as big as you. I try not to think about it—until I open my front door and come face to face with a spider eating my neighbour’s car. Frozen like a deer on the road, I slowly back away, but it’s too late. I run to my room, and five minutes later I go outside to see the unidentified spider making itself at home on my roof. So I have an idea. I take the hamburger out of my freezer and cover it with spider-killer and put it outside.

So now we wait.

It’s the next day and the meat is stinky. The spider is s-i-i-i-tting there in the dog house. Hmm, if I take this board and cover the entrance . . .Yes it worked!

“Hey, let me out! Um hello, let me out please.”

“But you’re a spider. So you’re scary.”

“You’re scary, too.

You chased me to the top of your house.”

“Oh well, I’m sorry.

If I let you out, do you promise to go?”

“Yes! Just let me out.”

“Okay. In three, two, one . . . ”

By

Av a 12

VINES ATTACK Goldfish the cat ate a mouse.Vines grew out of the cat’s mouth and a mouse crawled out. The mouse had eaten a magic seed, and that’s why vines had grown out of the cat’s mouth.

The mouse lived at a wizard’s house and had accidentally eaten the magic seed. Goldfish started hacking as if he was hacking up a hairball. Finally the seed came out, and the vines with it. The vines grew up the walls and Goldfish kept scratching up the vines. Then the vines retreated.

One day Goldfish the cat was sitting on the couch and heard a noise from under the couch. Goldfish thought it sounded like thorns scraping the floors. And He looked under the couch and saw a vine! “It’s the same one that was in my throat!” he exclaimed. “I should probably pour hot water on it and make the vines wither.” He got a big cup of boiling water from the kitchen.

“Aha!” Goldfish meowed as he poured the water on the vines.

They withered and were never seen again.

By

Ni ob

e 13

PLANTA

By

They started to crawl up my back. “Ahhh!” I screamed.

Oh, hi. Let’s start from the beginning. It was 2020. I was at school, in the shower room after gym. As I turned the shower on and put on some shampoo, a cockroach came out of the drain. I ran out with the shampoo still in my hair. Since then the town has got used to it, but the bugs keep growing. It is a problem for people in cars, since the worms leave a trail of slime, which makes the cars drive off the road. Most families have wasps or bees that they use to fly, because the spiders tore the place apart. Our homes are in the overgrown flowers.

We are going to the hospital because my sister has maggots. She got them from her friend, Izzy.

My sister’s name is Sam, and mine is Yuki. I go to a private school.

The ground is far below the town I live in. The road is floating above the ground. It is one year’s travel away. Some live on Mars because it is two days away. So the plants can go through space.

Em m 14

a

I HATE BUGS I hate bugs. I hate wasps because it hurts a lot when they sting you. I hate bugs because they disgust me when they move.

The bug that disgusts me the most is the cockroach. How do people tell if an ant is a queen? How do people know where bugs live? What if a bug or a spider climbed onto a plane and flew to a place like Canada? Would that bug start living in Canada? If bugs from different countries started living in Canada, I would buy as much bug spray as I could and carry it wherever I go.

B

y

Ke nyo

n 15

MY TERRARIUM

B

y

No

lan 16

TELL ME YOUR NAME Once upon a time there was a little elf that lived in a small cabin.

His name was Tell Me Your Name. He had trouble making new friends because of his name. So he went to Best Buy to buy a Samsung tablet and an iPhone X. He downloaded Minecraft and Roblox. He got friends on Minecraft, Bowmasters and Roblox and he played with his friends on Roblox and Minecraft every day. But then Tell Me Your Name had to go on vacation in the middle of Egypt. A beetle bit him. He decided to play Minecraft and Roblox with his friends. But there wasn’t any internet connection so he played Bowmasters.

By

Ch

ris

toph er 17

DRAW YOUR OWN:

TERRAR IU

18

M

BUG HOTEL

19

AUTOGRAPHS

As an author of a Writers’ Exchange book, you are invited to sign up for FREE after-school and summer programs at the Writers’ Exchange home base at 207–877 East Hastings Street.

We run programs for kids in grades 1 to 12.

Ask your teacher for a signup sheet, go to vancouverWE.com or call Jennifer at 604-428-8228 for more information.