Santa is Coming to Town

We started a writing project last week to work on persuasion techniques. To introduce the project I had the students do a quick writing exercise with the directions as follows:

Pretend you are one of Santa's reindeer. Write a short letter to Santa Claus to persuade him that you should get a year off this year.

The students were excited to get started as soon as I went over the directions, but a few students had some questions. There were the typical questions like "How long does it have to be?" and "Do we need to spell everything right?" One student asked, "Can I pretend I'm any one of the reindeer?" I told Jillian that she could pretend to be whichever reindeer she wanted. Then Alexander's hand shot up.

"I could even be Rudolph?!"

Before I could answer, Josh replied in matter-of-fact tone:

"Rudolph isn't one of the reindeer. That's just a story. You have to be one of the real ones."

I decided to leave that one alone. The kids decided after a brief debate that Rudolph was a reindeer and therefore you could pretend you were him.

Whew.

About 10 minutes later, I overheard a conversation between Natalie and Samantha. They were discussing some of the things they wanted this year for Christmas. My favorite quote from their conversation:

"Santa always comes to my house. Even if I'm bad. I think.... (with great concentration and focus) my parents might have something to do with it though.

I just pray they don't ask me questions about these things...