a winning essay

Last week, Sunshine was presented with an award at a district-wide ceremony for writing the following essay based on the topic, "Beauty Is...".

The Good Things and Bad Things of Beauty

Beauty is something that people like to see and something that people like to be around. My Gramma is someone that I like to see and I like to be around. She is beautiful.

My Gramma is nice to me and I love to see her. When she comes to visit, she likes to play with me. She likes to read stories to me and sing “You are My Sunshine,” when I am going to sleep. When I visit Gramma in California, I like to go to the beach with her and find seashells and catch waves. Sometimes, we get too close to the moving waves and we have to run really fast from them. Sometimes, my pants get wet and Gramma has to wrap me in a blanket on the way home. We keep our seashells in a jar in her backyard. They’re always there when I visit. At Gramma’s house, I have a pink room and a princess bed. There are a lot of toys there and Gramma sits with me on the floor to play with them.

My Gramma had cancer and that is the bad part of this story. It was sad because we couldn’t do fun stuff anymore. Gramma’s cancer medicine made her tired and sick. I couldn’t visit her and she couldn’t visit me, and she couldn’t talk on the phone as much. There are more sad parts. Gramma didn’t look the same anymore, because she was bald. When you have cancer, the medicine that kills the cancer makes your hair fall out. It made me feel sad because she didn’t look like my Gramma. She didn’t look right. She didn’t look real to me. She had to wear a hair wig, so it wouldn’t seem like she was bald to people. At night when she was sleeping, she wore a soft and fuzzy blue hat, like long wool, to keep her head warm.

Even though Gramma looked different and couldn’t do a lot of things with me anymore, inside there was the same Gramma. She will never be different inside. She will never be wrong inside. It’s the same Gramma that is still beautiful to me. She still had love for me and there were still things we could do together. She still sang to me, but she had to do the singing on the phone. She still listened to my stories about fun stuff that had happened. She still had good ideas of things we could do together when she felt better.

My Gramma is someone that I like to be around and someone that I like to see. She is beautiful to me.

written by Sunshine in 2009
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This essay took her a really long time to write, as I made her go through each of the steps of the writing process as she did it. She also had to handwrite it, which is hard for Sunshine because of her hyperhidrosis. Most of her friends drew/painted pictures, but I wanted her to do something more challenging for herself. So I was really happy for myself that she won an award, because the next time I make her do something that's hard, she might not fight me as much!

She continues to be really, really pleased with herself. She also received a blue ribbon on her own campus for this essay, so she has a nice accumulation now. I'm proud of her, because she knows that she earned them, not for participating, but for doing a stellar job. I hope that lesson of hard work will serve her well.

Look how pleased she is to find her name in the program!



Very few people write literature for this competition. Most entries are in the Visual Arts category. The other girls who placed were in higher grades than Sunshine.


Pleased as punch.