Schoolwide Blog

Dear Community,

Subject: How do you revise and re-imagine? Free Lesson of The Week with Amy Hest (12/09/09)

How do you help students get their readers excited about their writing? How do you help them revise their drafts for vividness and clarity? This week author Amy Hest tells you how she breathes new life into her writing by adding creative details.

Learn how to:

• Recreate people and places in the minds of readers;
• Revise with an eye for detail and clarity; and
• Use the revision stage of the writing process to help a good piece of writing get even better and more interesting.

More...

Lesson Title: Reflection—Memoir vs. Personal Narrative

Subject: Writing Workshop / Revision

Audience: 2–5

RATIONALE:

A distinguishing element of memoir is the inclusion of reflection. Revision creates the opportunity to reread drafts and add writing with a reflective stance.

PREPARATION:

Video Clip: “Memoir vs. Personal Narrative” featuring Schoolwide Literacy Consultant Dr. Linda Bausch

Book: Sitti’s Secrets by Naomi Shihab Nye
Click here to purchase a copy of Sitti’s Secrets.

Make a chart or transparency of the Appendix: “Questions for Reflection” 

CLICK HERE FOR THE LESSON OF THE WEEK.

WATCH VIDEO: “Memoir vs. Personal Narrative”

INFORM
Revision is an opportunity to look at our drafts anew—to breathe new life into them! Since reflection is a distinguishing element of memoir, today we are going to look again at our drafts and see if we have included the element of reflection.

PRESENT
Reflection is a key feature of memoir. In memoir, writers often answer questions about their lives and how their particular memories affected them. How have I changed since this event or because of this event? What have I learned? What do I want people to know about me as it relates to this event? These are the kinds of questions memoirists answer.

Let’s read a passage from the book Sitti’s Secrets to see how author Naomi Shihab Nye included reflection.

Read the next to last page in Sitti’s Secrets, “Does my grandmother know . . .” The end of this book has the author back at home reflecting on her grandmother. She wonders what her grandmother knows and then goes on to offer how she now thinks of the world in light of her experiences on “the other side of the world.” Note that the author asks questions out loud that she does not have an answer for. That can be reflection, too! You don’t have to know all the answers to your questions. Asking questions is part of reflection.

ENGAGE
Using our chart, let’s go over the reflection questions and talk about how these questions can help you add reflection to your memoir. Show the chart or transparency of the Appendix. Read and discuss the questions.

REITERATE

Use these questions to help you think about what kinds of reflection you can add. Reread your draft as if you were seeing it for the first time. Do you need to add reflection in your draft?

On Tuesday, October 20th, in honor of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) sponsored National Day on Writing, every classroom in my elementary school took a few minutes to make a list of all the different ways people use writing at home, at school, and in their jobs. The number of items the students named surprised everyone. Everything you read was written by someone. Writing is everywhere!

I am without access to email this morning as something mysterious is going on with my school’s server.  At least, it’s a mystery to me since I have not received any email since last night.  That’s unusual and worrisome as I’m always waiting for a response from someone about something.  It’s an example of the fast-paced lives we lead. More...

We’d like to think so.

So while we’ll be focusing on a specific topic (or feature) each month as part of our blogging calendar, we’d also like to stress that the ongoing topics, such as writing, testing, literacy, technology, and others, will always be a consistent part of our social space.  Therefore we invite everyone to go through our archives and weigh in on what we’ve done so far, what we aren’t doing, and how we can better improve this space for teachers across the country. Our new format is an effort to provide both the breadth for widespread topics and the scope with which to handle them with the detail needed to create anything of real value.

Letters to the editor? We want them.  Just click on the comments below.

We have been talking a lot about the success of a social site for teachers as well as others like it. The thought occurred that though it would be nice to have a platform for grand ideas that shape the educational canon, sometimes we tend to over-think the simple steps toward our goals. . .me especially.

In Seth Godin’s blog today he puts it as simply as possible:

“The pillars of social media site success

Why people choose to visit online social sites:

    * Who likes me?
    * Is everything okay?
    * How can I become more popular?
    * What's new?
    * I'm bored, let's make some noise

None of these are new, but in the digital world, they're still magnetic.”

As we explore what a site like this can do, I think it’s important to remember the essentials of what works in the real world.  In other words, thinking about how we build our real time communities is essential to social growth online. The questions I find myself asking next are:  How good does it feel to share your experiences? How nice does it feel to be heard?

Links for 3.10.09.  If any of the topics interest you we'd be delighted to hear you respond.

Character Education in Home

How do You Feel About Technology In Classrooms

Cross Grade Interaction Idea

Collaborative Learning Through Online Tools

Day in a Life of a Teacher with Technology

My previous post mentioned that "Bloggers don't have to say everything at once. We can add a new idea every day, piling on a thesis over time."

This past week blogger Robin7 began an interesting sequence on cross grade conversations. You can read the thread by clicking here: 

  What's useful about this method of posting is not only the brevity with which it is tendered  but the opportunity for these ideas to evolve through reader participation.  By providing ongoing topics or columns that facilitate conversation, we can also archive, promote, and disseminate item by item or, in the case of Robin's book, use pieces to promote the entire thesis.  

Check out Robin's book below: Hopefully she will share more on this topic and how it shapes education. Perhaps having those conversations here is a reasonable place to start?

Some useful information from social guru Seth Godin:

  "Write like a blogger

Hey, I'm John Reilly, and what I'll be doing on SchoolwideBlog is finding some of the best content on the web for educators. So let's get started!

Angela Maiers will be finding your posts all month long and noting which ones are great.

Angela Maiers - Enjoy Great Tweets

If you were to build a new school, what technologies would you include?

Help Wanted - Building A New Secondary School

I'll be showing up about once a day so make sure to come back to look for more interesting content!