Air Ball

Personal Narrative Characteristics

After reading your personal narrative drafts, I want to review how writers choose to develop topics that are valuable or meaningful.  In other words, consider a story’s potential and why to tell that particular story.  

To do this, answer these questions:

• 

  Make sure you have all
  these characteristics
  in your personal narrative

  Which generating ideas do I have the most to say about?
• What mattered the most to me?
• Which story creates vivid images?

Let me show you how I did this with my drafts.

Which generating ideas do I have the most to say about?

• Playing basketball with Teresa - shirt/embarrassing moment
• Frank - my first love
• Richard - gingerbread houses

What mattered the most to me? Or why does this story matter?

• Frank
• Basketball - shirt/embarrassing moment

What did I learn/How did I grow from this experience? Which creates vivid images?

• Basketball - shirt/embarrassing moment

Now, I am ready to write my draft of my small moment about playing basketball with Teresa and loosing my shirt. Oh, how embarrassing!

Partner Talk

Now that we are reading the same book as our partner, it is time to talk about our books but to go beyond retelling and to really dig into our books.

In order to be successful with this we need to have the mini-lesson SOS in mind.

• Supplies - be sure to have the supplies that you need - book, reader's notebook, stickies, your log, pencil.
• On top of Reading - be sure to be on the same page as your partner. Do not read ahead!
• Something to say - be prepared with something to say. Use your stickies to make a strong claim and then find evidence (a quote) to support your claim.

Let the conversations begin. By having this in-depth conversation about your book, did you walk away with new ideas and thinking? I hope so!

Reading Responses - Stop Light Approach

When responding to our reading try using the stop light approach. Good readers respond to their reading by:

• Making strong claims
• Citing the text to support the claim
• Explaining the claim and quote in own words

In class we read "What's So Funny Mr. Scieskza?" and I provided samples of responses ( a low, medium, and high).  As you continue to write responses to your reading, use these samples to guide you. 

Low

Medium

High