Tall Tales with Sid Fleischman

Happy Birthday Sid Fleischman! Celebrate this Newbery award-winning author by writing a tall tale, one of his many talents. From an interview in The ABCs of Writing for Children, Fleischman says, “Tall tales are highly specialized humor. . . Take Jim Bridger (he really lived) who discovered that it took eight hours for an echo to return from a distant mountain. He turned it into an alarm clock by shouting, “Wake up!” before he went to bed. The next morning, eight hours later, the echo returned and woke him up.”

Exercise: Brainstorm like Sid Fleischman does. In McBroom’s Ghost, it was so cold, “Polly dropped her comb on the floor, when she picked it up the teeth were chattering.”

It was so hot . . .
The mountain was so steep . . .
He was so fat . . .
She was so skinny . . .

Have fun with tall tale humor!