Justine’s Favourite Place

Justine loved her extended family. This is a speech she wrote when she was in Grade 4. It’s not the speech that won her a place at the Legion Public Speaking contests but it shows how much she loved going to her grandparents’ house for holidays.
                               

                                   MY FAVOURITE PLACE

“Yes! We are going to Wingham. Hello teachers judges and fellow students. My speech this year is about something very special to me. My grandparents house.

Now I guess you’re wondering what Wingham is. It’s a small town 150 miles from here. 3000 people live there. I know you think that’s a lot of people but really it isn’t. My grandparents lived there for 28 years. 

For fun, my cousins and I played hide and seek for hours. There were great hiding places because the house was so big. If there was a good hiding spot, we found it. Another thing we loved to do was ride our bikes around the big circular driveway. I remember when my grandpa went downtown to buy me a bike when I was four or five years old. He asked me what colour I wanted and I said green. He came back with an orange one and I was disappointed. My grandmother tried to make it up me by giving me a green jellybean and I don’t even like green jellybeans. 

In the summer we would walk to the park and make good use of the public swimming pool. My favorite part of going to Wingham was that my sister and cousins could walk all over town. It’s not that we can’t walk around in Hampton, it’s just there’s nowhere to go. My parents would never let me go to the show by myself but there we could. There are lots of stores to walk to so we could buy candy. 

I speak for all my cousins when I say that our clubhouse was the best. It was three concrete walls and dirt. It led into a valley and into town. We would go on nature walks and find rusty things and stuff like that. 

My favorite holiday is Christmas. On Christmas eve at my grandparents’ place all the cousins gather around and my aunt reads “The Night Before Christmas.” Then everybody picks a chair. I guess you were wondering why we pick a chair. Well, we get gifts from Santa and he puts all the gifts on the chair. If we didn’t pick a chair we wouldn’t know what gifts would be ours.

One thing I didn’t like about Wingham was the three hour drive. One time my dad said he would take a shortcut and it took us five hours.
This past June my grandpa died. We will miss him very much and will miss going to Wingham. The big old house is too big for grandma so she moved. But we will always have the memories of going to Wingham.”

This speech is a wonderful example of Justine’s heart and humor. I especially liked re-reading the part where she describes the clubhouse. Three concrete walls and dirt. It was the composter! The kids sure had fun there and this speech really captures it from a child’s point of view.

32 thoughts on “ Justine’s Favourite Place”

    1. She was a happy child. She was a good public speaker as a child too. She won 2 contests for another speech. We have it on video but we don’t have a copy of it. I always thought she might speak about her illness one day.

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