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

About the Author

As a middle schooler, Mrs. Haas remembers getting her papers returned to her marked up in red ink clearly identifying her abuses of the written language: spellings slip-ups, grammatical gaffes and punctuation booboos.  Needless to say, author was not on her career choice list. However, encouraged by her large family of teachers (father and 7 out of 11 siblings), Mrs. Haas learned that writing is really about expressing the heart and not discovering errors. In fact, her childhood school experiences, frenzied family life, and past and current students provide her with a wealth of writing inspirations.  Some day she hopes to have her book about Third Culture Kids - Home published, but for now, she is content with her students being her audience. Mrs. Haas currently lives in Singapore with her mathematical marvel husband, Jim; gymnastic genius daughter, Taylor; and sport enthusiast son, Eli.

Poetry by Me!

After reading Locomotion a novel in verse, by Jacqueline Woodson,
we decided to try to write our own story using poetry.

Introduction to Poetry

Poetry is an extremely special genre.  Through poems we can experience joy, grief, and wonder, but they also invite us to see every day life in a new light.  In "Introduction to Poetry," Billy Collins reveals a fascinating explanation of what poetry can do and how to enjoy it.  

To begin with,  Collins creates images through the use of similes and metaphors helping the reader understand his ideas.  By looking through the light of a colored slide, I can see the poem's meaning and by pressing an ear against its hive, I can learn to hear the sweetness the poem holds. From walking inside a poem's room looking for a light switch to gliding as a waterskier across the poem, I can get the feeling of experiencing the poem firsthand.

Later, Collins ends the poem with a change in mood and tone.  After his bright images of how a poem should be read, he ends his poem with, "But all they want to do/is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it."  This personification of a poem being tortured shows how forcing an interpretation out of a poem can be a criminal act.

In the end, this poem leaves a lasting impression. I chose it because I always used to think that there were secret interpretations of a poem that need to be found.  Instead, Collins knows how important it is for readers to find their own meanings and connections in the poems they read.