HARLINGEN – Isis Martin can’t sleep.
She dreads the dark figure lurking at the edge of her dreams.
This strange specter has been haunting her for three months. She only sleeps two or three hours a night, and she’s finding it increasingly difficult to function.
“Why do you plague me like this?” she asks in the YA novel “Creatura” by Nely Cab who gave three presentations recently at Travis Elementary.
“They were really excited and they kept asking me more and more and more,” said Cab, of Brownsville. “I said, ‘I can’t give the ending away. You have to read the book if you want to find out.’”
The presentations were aligned with their preparations and intended to serve several purposes. One was to help prepare them for the STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) exams on March 28.
They’ve been working on their writing in class, and Cab’s presentations expanded on that.
“She was here talking about the writing process, what the students are learning right now,” said Principal Beulah Rangel. “She did a fantastic job. These are the types of opportunities they need.”
The children, all fourth-graders, seemed to have enjoyed the presentation while learning about literature and writing.
“I think it was cool that she came and told us about the writing process,” said Adan Guajardo, 10. “I liked learning about it. We could answer some of the questions she asked us, like ‘How do we brainstorm?’”
Giselle Juarez, 9, recalled the writing process isn’t easy.
It has to go through numerous processes, she recalled. Cab told them her work goes through 11 sets of eyes, and that’s the simplified version.
Creatura was quite a process, one they remembered very well.
“She was having a dream about a monster,” Adan said.
“She was creating a monster in her dreams,” said Abigail Garza, 10. “She used to have control of her dreams.”
Cab told them her books come from her dreams.
“I asked them if they had dreams and they said yes,” she said. “I said those dreams can inspire stories. You can take those dreams and put anything that has happened in your life and you can mesh them together and that’s how you get a story.”
She noticed they were a little antsy about writing essays for the STAAR.
“They were having problems trying to understand why the first sentence of an essay was important,” she said. “I compared it to them being the author, the fishermen, and the first line in the essay is the hook.”
The writer must put some “really juicy delicious bait on the hook,” she said.
“Who’s going to come for the bait? That bait is the first sentence,” she told them. “They said the fish. And I said, ‘Who would the fish be in this case?’”
The readers. Now they understood.
For more on Nely Cab, go to www.nelycab.com or
www.nelycab.blogspot.com
