The tomatoes that ate a school (and the story that won a PBS writing award)

There’s just something about strange stuff coming to life and threatening the very existence of school that kids seem to love. For Shaler second grader Connor Smith, that turned into a third-place winning story in the national PBS Kids Writers Contest.

Connor has being trying to win another spot in the competition since he got an honorable mention in kindergarten, says his mother, Jamie, a teacher at Pittsburgh Linden K-5. He began writing sentences early on, she reports. “We challenged him to expand on this and he enjoyed the process so much that we just kept encouraging him to enter.”

His winning, hand-illustrated book, called “Seeds from Space,” was inspired by a conversation with his grandmother, a science teacher at Beatty Career Center in the North Hills, where her class received and planted seeds NASA had sent into orbit as part of an experiment.

In Connor’s version, space-faring tomato seeds grow normally at first, then become human-like, with eyes on their plump bodies and limbs instead of leaves.

The school lunch ladies decide to pick the veggie anyway, but are soon in a battle for the very soul of the cafeteria. They use their hairnets, and paper bags, but they can’t contain the rampaging red creatures until they hit on a solution: make them into a sauce.

The ending’s a real cliffhanger, Jamie says. The story’s hero “hears the sauce still slithering and he thinks he hears the sauce burp.

“It’s been an opportunity to see the entire writing process go from start to finish,” she adds, “deciding on his idea, deciding on which part of his story he is going to tell.” This year, Connor typed his contest entry for the first time, “because it looked more scientific.”

Aimed at promoting literacy through hands-on learning, the contest regularly attracts entries from 62 PBS stations across the country. This is the third year in a row that a kid who won WQED’s regional contest has placed in the national results. Five-year-old Nikolai Nawrocki, of Wayne, which is also in WQED’s region, placed first in the national kindergarten category as well.

Connor wasn’t all that talkative, but he admitted that coming up with his entry each year is “a little bit hard,” but fun nonetheless.

Says his mother: “He wants to enter again in third grade.”