Today we peer reviewed our Harris Burdick stories and gave constructive feedback on them to our peers. Our focus lesson for today was how do we write creatively to create a certain feeling of time and place? We brainstormed how we might be able to do that. We also focused on specifics--For example, saying, "She rode in the car" does not help us create time and place. She rode in the Ford Fairlaine with the fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror on the last day of high school singing Rock Around the Clock at the top of her lungs. This example helps us create a much better mental image of time/place. For homework this week, students will choose two of the following:
1. 1980s Shopping Mall
2. Victorian London
3. 2026 High School
4. 1950s Diner
5. 1930s Farm
6. 2000 Suburbs
7. 1890 Rural Tennessee
8. 1943 London
You will first brainstorm all the objects, smells, sounds, clothing/makeup/hairstyles, language, slang, weather, technology, and social "rules" of the two time periods. Make this in a chart in your notebook. Then you will write a short story (one page--no more than front and back) about a teenager trying to get home in two different times/places above. You can make the reason the can't get home whatever you would like--though I would probably do a bit of research and see if any of the settings could be preventing them. Make this go in any direction you would like (funny, scary, suspenseful, sad, etc), but specifically focus on time and place. Do not explictly name either in your writing. We should be able to pick up on your time and place by the clues you drop in your writing! Be creative!
Today we annotated Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin with a writers' lens and discussed how to write with a time constraint in our story. This story is literally the story of one hour. We will be using the constraints Chopin uses as a mentor to write our own short story of time.
Today we did some goal setting and some writing about what we would like to learn in this class. We also read the book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. This is a very fun picture book. Everyone wrote down some of the stories they liked and we circled back ask so many questions about the picture we saw.
For homework this week, students need to write one page (either just the front or the front and the back) telling a short story about their chosen picture from Harris Burdick. They should also start a list of "What if?" questions.
Moving forward, all of our communications will be in the google classroom!