When I picked up Antonio from school this afternoon, his teacher told me that he was difficult during a portion of class today.

They are going to be creating a book, and today's assignment was to create the cover. They needed to come up with a title, draw a picture and put themselves as the author and illustrator.
Antonio stated that writing is not his thing, and refused to do the project. Then he went a step further and shredded the book cover he had started on, and refused to start another one.

I got the details for the assignment and once we got home, set him up with the necessary supplies and stepped back while he came unhinged.
Seems he wanted to do a true story, and another kid already took the title idea he had.
And well
WRITING IS NOT HIS THING!

he says.

While he sat at the table and alternated between being mad and calming down, I thought about his situation.

Then I actually had an idea. I asked him if he was worried about how long the story he needed to write was going to be.
He said, "YEEESSSSSSSS!"

I asked him if he thought he was going to have to write a story as long as Frog and Toad or Charolotte's Web, which we're about halfway through reading.
He did.
I told him that I bet the story they were going to write was only going to be a few pages, and since they were illustrating the book as well, a lot of space would probably be taken up by pictures.

This totally settled him down.
We talked about ideas of real things that he found interesting that he could write about, and he decided that he wanted to write a story about going to see the snow.
In 5 minutes he had his book cover finished.
And he was about 10,000 times less freaked than when he first got home.