A Summer With a Friend Written and Illustrated by Brianna Walworth

Dedication To my awesome, loving babysitter who cared for me for years — Kim Walker

Ring! Ring! School’s out, and everyone is talking about what they are doing this summer except for me! This summer is the worst summer ever!

Jenny is going to Florida. Mallory is visiting her grandma in Utah. But I going to a babysitter. This summer is turning out to be the worst summer ever!

I dream about what my summer could only be if I were doing all the fun things the other girls are doing!

I love my babysitter. I just don’t love being with all of the boys. I am the only girl and it is just no fun. This summer is not going so well! I wish I had a girl to play with.

The next day there are people moving into the house next to me. So I decide to go meet the family who lives there. It turns out that there is a girl who lives there. Now I will have someone to play with at my house.

It is the second day of summer. When I get to my babysitter’s house, I see someone sitting in the living room. I am starting to get excited! It is a girl.

I say, “ Hi, I’m Cara.” She looks at me and I look at her. We both smile. We know that we are going to be best of friends. This summer is going to be great!

At least I had a good summer. My friend and I played and played. But tomorrow is the first day of school and I still have no school friends.

Ring! Ring! It is the beginning of English and I see in the seat in front of me… Amelia! I can tell that this school year is going to be great!

She is so happy that her best friend is in her class. It was the most awesome summer ever! And now it looks like it will be the best school year, too!

Now I have a friend and Amelia has an ever lasting friend, too! BFF’S forever!

Reflection I have been writing since the beginning. It is one of my favorite things to do. Over the years I have learned how to be a great writer. One of my main sources is Literacy Enrichment. We write so many different pieces. In this story we are writing a fiction picture book. The first thing we did was plan out our story; that helped us a lot. This year we did something new. We picked Mentor Texts. I think that helped us a lot. My Mentor Text was A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I picked this book because it had something different about it. It had a phrase under each paragraph. So that gave me an idea to do the same thing. Another thing I liked about the book is where the illustrations were in the book. The picture was at the top and the words were at the bottom. I hope that everyone can enjoy writing as much as I do. Writing this story was really fun and using another book as an example made this a lot easier. Enrichment is a great way to become a better writer.

About the Author My name is Brianna Walworth and I am eleven years old. I’m in fifth grade and I go to Caledonia-Mumford Elementary School. I have been in Literacy Enrichment since second grade. Every Tuesday and Thursday I look forward to coming to Enrichment and learning something new. Everything I learn makes me become a better writer for the piece that I’m writing. Almost everything I learned I had to use in this book. I really enjoy writing and it has become an important part of my life.