Today, we started our day with a word sort. Students were given a list of 40 words and had to sort them into groups based on their own criteria. After discussing what criteria they used to sort (a few groups did small, medium, and big words), they were then able to practice their parts of speech and resort the words by nouns, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. We had some debate about the word “global” but ultimately decided it was an adjective.

After a quick brain break, we listened to an interview with Jeff Kinney, the author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, on a podcast. He spoke about his dad’s love of comic books and how it influenced him to want to become a newspaper comic creator and then eventually a graphic novel author! We discussed how Jeff changed throughout the moments he spoke about in the interview, and then, students were invited to think about their own lives and what moments they would want to make sure are included in future interviews about their lives. We made timelines to help us organize our thoughts and visualize when the changes happened. Feel free to talk to them about what they thought was important enough to include in their timeline!

After lunch, we read a short story called Ghost Cat about a little sister dealing with being on their first vacation since losing their father, so she creates an imaginary ghost cat to keep her company. The story is told from the point of view of her older brother, so we can’t be positive that the ghost cat was really imaginary; we just know the brother never saw it. This led to a great discussion about narrators and how we get information in a story.

Finally, we ended our day by looking back at all of our brainstorms and timelines about change in our own lives, and each student chose the topic for their own autobiography that they will begin writing tomorrow!! Tonight, talk to your student about what events in their lives feel important enough to include in their timeline and what topic they ultimately chose to focus on; it might surprise you!

Tomorrow, we will explore the hamburger model of writing and hear Kate Dicamillo talk about her experiences living through a winter in Minnesota.