Wednesday, 2/17/2010

CREATIVE WRITING


Children's Stories

• We talked about our trip to Stewart yesterday, and we talked about our plans for the children's stories.  I put everyone's comments up on the big screen.
• We brainstormed about what we could do with the first-graders, if we made another trip over to Stewart:  have them look at our story thus far and comment on it.
• I handed out the blank storyboards and talked about how we will use them for our children's stories.

Writing Lesson #1

• I handed back the Autobiographical Poem rough drafts, and I put up a snippet from everyone's poem on the Big Screen.  We talked about how to be successful with each aspect of the rubric:  title, details, order, line breaks, diction....  We spent time talking about WHAT made certain titles effective, and HOW people were breaking their lines, and WHY people put things in a certain order in their poem.

Workshop/Writing Assignment

• We had twenty minutes to work towards our final draft of the Autobiographical Poem, which is due FRIDAY.

Writing Lesson #2

• We quickly reviewed Connotation and Denotation (p. 28), and then we spent time talking about loaded words:  words that sound funny, without meaning anything funny; sad, loud, quiet, etc. (p. 29)
• After talking about the different between thinking on a figurative level and a literal level, people paired up to continue working on page 29.  It was obvious from discussions I heard that people were elevating their thinking to a figurative level.

Homework

• None

HACAW

Due

• Two Lenses Poem and Photo Memory Memoir, IF you did not hand them in yesterday

Workshop (Thirty Minutes)

• Everyone saved a poem that has not been workshopped on the Big Screen into the "Poem Workshop" folder in the student volume.
• We worked on our Graphic Memoir (due Friday).

Big Screen Sharing (Twenty Minutes)

• We read and workshopped Katey Jo's poem, Tyler's poem, and Jamie's memoir.  Everyone made thoughtful comments about the work.  (We will continue workshopping tomorrow and Friday.)

Writing Experiment

• We spent the last fifteen minutes of class typing a poem/letter to our future child.  I read the directions on page 6, and I read Ben's model, and then we started typing.

Homework

• The Graphic Memoir is due FRIDAY.