Your contest entry seems like a "flash fiction" story for younger readers. Good for you for attempting one--they can be difficult: communicating a complete idea is such a short amount of words.
Good aspects of your story are: you attempted to balance your story with humor, setting detail, dialogue between two characters.
Some concerns/suggestions: (1) This sentence: "An hour later they are the park where they are going to go fishing." needs the word "at" between "are" and "the".
(2) Instead of calling him "Robert's father" at the beginning, and then telling us that "Patrick" is Robert's father later, couldn't you just refer to him as "Dad" at the beginning of the story? Is it part of the contest that they both must have names?
(3) This pond that your characters are going to...it's cold enough to snow, but the pond hasn't frozen over? I could just be the first day that it's cold, so that's not a big deal, but
(4) The pond that they are at has someone known as "they" who has a grill. Is this a park? Suggestion: could it be the back of a vacation home where they have a pond or lake at the back of their house, and it's their grill?
After reading your experience with surviving the tornado my "helpful hints" would be these: as this is a nonfiction piece it's obvious that you have a lot of personal information with which to form the story, and that can be good; it can also make things difficult. In this short piece you communicate a lot of information. The way that you present the information seems a bit too close to the way that a natural conversation would go. In writing, even for a nonfiction piece, the text/dialogue communication between the writer and the reader has to be smooth. While you definitely communicate the events it felt more like I was reading an editorial from a newspaper than an article in a nonfiction circulation, and even at that it felt a bit rough around the edges.
I would suggest varying your sentence length. Several of your sentences are long; while you do you commas to break them up, having a string of long sentences becomes trying to the reader. Intermix shorter sentences and longer sentences of varying length in this piece. Also, using fiction writing devices is acceptable in nonfiction works: onomatopoeias, similes and metaphors, and especially sensory images--it's not enough for the reader to know that you were there...the reader has to feel like they were standing right next to you when all this happened. I hope this helps.
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