Caleb's Scholarship

Hurray for our little scholar! Caleb found out today that he was awarded a $225 scholarship to cover the cost of a summer camp he chose. Sixty-three scholarships were awarded to gifted students in grades K-12 throughout the state of Texas. Along with letters of recommendation from his gifted teacher and parents, he wrote an essay about himself and the camp he would like to attend. (It's a cute read that captures his personality, so I've included it below.) When he found out he'd won the scholarship, Caleb was so excited. Although he'd really like to attend Camp Invention, he says he wishes he could put some of the money in his bank account. The kids get to design their own vehicles which they crash test with eggs and water balloons, create their own model roller coasters, and take apart broken machines to invent something new. Sounds like lots of fun.

Hi, my name is Caleb. I’m in first grade. I am seven years old. I like to have cereal for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, and barbeque for dinner.

I like to do reading. Right now I’m reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is the very last Harry Potter book. I guess my favorite character has to be Harry because he’s the star of all the books and the movies, and he’s the Boy Who Lived, or The Chosen One. Dumbledore left Harry the first snitch he caught on his very first Quidditch game. There was writing on the snitch that said, “I open at the close.” I still haven’t gotten to the part of the story where it says what that means. I have no idea what it means, and I can’t wait to find out! When I was in kindergarten, I won $5 for reading the most books in the school. I read as many as I could, which was the whole log. That was 315 books in three weeks! I felt pretty good.

I’ve been taking piano since this summer. I practice almost every day, and my mom is kind of like my substitute piano teacher when it’s not Friday because she listens to me play. I’m on the third set of piano books, and this week I’m getting the fourth one. By the time you read this, I’ll probably already be in the fourth one. “The Elephant and the Flea” is my favorite song I’ve ever played because it’s the hardest one in the whole recital book. Before my piano teacher Mrs. Bailey told me not to skip ahead to the hard songs, I liked to do that pretty much. I had my first recital in December. I played “The Caravan” and “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas.” The first verse of “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” I played just like it was in the book, but on the second verse I added notes, made some parts staccato, and played it jazzy.

This year, I won a blue ribbon both in music and art in the Reflections contest at Bledsoe. The topic was “How I Can Make a Difference,” so I chose planting a seed. It was the first and only song I ever wrote. I started by writing a poem about a seed, and then I made the music. For my picture, I drew the number of things a seed needs to do before it grows into a flower. (I also included a seed that already grew into a flower too.) Mom said that there were two surprises when I got to school. One of them was when I got two blue ribbons in a row, and a white ribbon for my story, and the other surprise was that my mom was Mystery Reader.

I also go to DI, which stands for Destination Imagination, and in March I’m going to do a play that my team wrote called “The Great Wall of Webkinz World.” In the play, I’m going to be a Webkin named Oinky. As you probably already know, I’m a pig, so I have to be dressed in pink! I just chose to be one. Oinky loses all his money and has to find it. A bad fairy from the charm forest has my money, and I have to pretend that I’m a piggy bank. My favorite line is, “Oh, I’ve always dreamed of someone looking for Kinzcash inside of me!”

Sometimes I like to be a magician called Caleb the Great. I have a scarf that changes colors and a rabbit that appears in a box out of nowhere. I also have a money maker that makes dollar bills out of blank pieces of paper. Once I showed it to my kindergarten class, and they all wanted to know how it worked.

Every day I walk a mile to school and tell the crossing guards some jokes. Here’s the one I told the day I wrote this essay. “Why do great bowlers always get strikes? Because they don’t have time to spare!” It all started when dad told me a joke that someone had told him at EDS. Here it is. “Why did the skeleton go to the movie alone? Because he had no-BODY to watch it with him.” The crossing guards sometimes guess the answers when they’ve heard the joke before. Otherwise, they usually don’t get it.

Whenever I have a birthday, I change my favorite color. The first year I choose one primary color, and that year I’ll have it as my favorite. The next year, I pick another primary color as my favorite. The third year I mix the primary colors into a secondary color, and then I have my favorite color for the next year. When I run out of colors, I’ll mix all the colors together to make brown, and then I’ll have white and black, and then I’ll make other colors like midnight blue, turquoise, and violet. When I run out of those colors, I’ll make up my own colors like brownish purplish greenish.

This summer I would like to go to Camp Invention because I want to be an inventor when I grow up. I would most look forward to the part of camp called Fantasy Inventions and Complicated Machines. The kind of complicated machines I think I would like to make are computers, televisions, and watches. I think I even want to make foods that have particles inside them that are shaped into parts of machines, and when I press a button food will start being electrical. Have you ever heard of foods with iron in them? I guess that’s one way I could make electrical cereals. I’ve also wanted to make my food science be magical. I could make a rabbit come out of a cookie’s hollow. I could even make my pastries jump up and dance around the table, and I could make the gummy worms wiggle in your mouth. I think that maybe I could also make a jack-in-the-box out of a cake. I could even make a cake appear out of thin air. When you turn the handle around, it would play “All Around the Mulberry Bush,” and the top of the cake would spring up and then a jester would hang out of the box. I’ve already invented some foods like Farm Cake. Once when I was at my great-grandma Dinah’s farm, I decided I might want to do some food science, so I picked all the fruits and vegetables from the farm and put them in a cake with some other ingredients. I used tomatoes, corn, soy beans, and a little bit of raspberries. Then we served some to Great Aunt Gloria, and she liked it. I also think that maybe I could make an airplane that goes into the ground, and a subway that flies in the air. A submarine could be swimming on land, and a train could go under water. I want to go to this camp because maybe one day I will become a famous scientist or inventor.

I hope you’ve enjoyed what I wrote. Goodbye!