Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2018 i Cricket Magazine Fiction and Non-Fiction Stories for Children and Young Teens

My little sister’s sitter Got a cutter from the baker, And she baked a little fritter From a pat of bitter butter. First she bought a butter beater Just to beat the butter better, And she beat the bit of butter With the beater that she bought. Then she cut the bit of butter With the little butter cutter, And she baked the beaten butter In a beaten butter baker. But the butter was too bitter And she couldn‘t eat the fritter So she set it by the cutter And the beater that she bought. And I guess it must have taught her Not to use such bitter butter, For she bought a bit of batter That was sweeter than the butter. And she cut the sweeter batter With the…

AT FIRST, CHRIS thought some kid was throwing a hollow rubber ball against the other side of the brick wall. But the poing poing poing came too close together to be a ball. “Hey, Chris, wait up.” Looking over his shoulder, Chris saw Ben running toward him, tennis shoes slapping the sidewalk. The sound of rubber against concrete echoed off the stone wall with a hollow ring. “Yo, Ben,” Chris said as Ben skidded to a stop. “Want to play some video games after homework?” “Yo, Chris,” Ben answered, panting from his run. “Can’t. I have to pack.” “Pack?” Chris asked, puzzled. “Where are you going?” “Home,” Ben answered as the boys fell into step with each other. “I’m going home tomorrow.” “You live right next-door to my house,” Chris…

Dear Cricket, Hi, everybuggy! Since Cricket has so many great stories, whenever I get an issue, I don’t stop till I have finished the whole mag! I started getting Cricket magazines when I was eight or nine and I still read them at age eleven. In regards to the April 2018 issue, I have some words to say: Good for you, Muffin! You pranked a master pranker! (That is, of course, Ladybug.) Some great stories in Cricket include “The Ghost on the Moor” (January–March 2018), “The Girl Who Codes” (March 2018), “The Kappa and the Farmer,” and “Two Violins” (both April 2018), and many more! I also love music! Your fav reader, Animal Girl Sunnyvale, California Dear Cricket, I know you have been told this a gazillion times, but I…

WE HAD JUST sat down to dinner when our mother made the announcement. I remember it was a frigid evening in January. Icicles shivered on the eaves, and the wind blew in a tantrum, curling white belts of snow through the naked limbs of the old oak in our backyard. My brother, Bat, who is five years younger than I am, was dumping gravy over his potatoes, and I was scrolling through a playlist of music on my phone, when Mom said, “I’ve accepted a job offer in Everett.” She then picked up her knife and fork and quietly cut into her chicken breast, waiting for this initial transaction of information to sink in. When neither I nor Bat responded, she went on. “We won’t be living in Everett, of…

WINNERS MAY 2018 POETRY CONTEST Birds First prize 10 and under Simran Gandhi, age 8 Bowling Green, OH Presents from the Birds I look up in awe colorful angels fly in the sky their feathers sparkling like glitter as they soar up above a bird-made rainbow appears they sing without words with the whistling wind when I’m down in the dumps I listen their songs make me dream I dream then splat oops . . . it poops! First prize 11 and up Ethne Anders, age 13 Stockton, CA Vermilion Flycatcher Little bird of brown and red Blazing scarlet on his head Sees a juicy fly to snare—Darts out and nabs it in midair Returns to perch on creosote To flick his tail and take note Of the desert scrub…

It’s the fall of 1948, and Gretchen Metzgar lives in Berlin, Germany, with her mother, father, and brother Karl. Although World War II ended three years earlier, Berlin is still a mass of rubble and confusion, and a new conflict has arisen. Following the war, the major Allied powers—France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union (Russia), and the United States—divided Germany into four zones to restore order in the defeated and devastated country. Berlin, the capital, was also divided into four sectors, even though it lay, like an isolated island, in eastern Germany, one hundred miles inside the Russian, or Soviet, zone. By 1948 the former Allies have different agendas. The Western democracies, led by the U.S., favor rebuilding Germany to become a strong democracy, according to what was called the…

SCIENTISTS AND AMATEURS dug up unfamiliar findings in the mid-nineteenth century. Fossils of plants and animals—including dinosaurs—were met with curiosity and disbelief. And some sites produced even stranger results. My friend Jeanne Stevens tells me that two men digging a well on October 16, 1869, made a startling discovery. Three feet below the earth on William “Stub” Newell’s farm in Cardiff, New York, they found not water but a stone man over ten feet tall. People flocked to the farm to see the “Cardiff Giant,” and Newell charged admission. Scholars, geologists, and religious men came to offer their opinions. Many believed that the stone man was a petrified giant while others said it was an ancient statue. One of Newell’s relatives, George Hull, became manager of the giant, selling shares…