Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 1, “The Story of You! An Invitation to Write and Explore Autobiography” (3rd-4th)
Welcome to day 1 of The Story of You! This week, we will be focusing on writing and specifically writing about ourselves.
After sharing some not fun facts about ourselves (I have brown hair, my shirt is green), we started our day by playing a “This or That” activity that asked questions such as do you prefer pizza or sushi and would you rather draw or dance as a way for us to get to know each other a little bit.
After ORA, we began our study of autobiographies by reading a poem called “Autobiographia Literaria” by Frank O’hara and discussed the concept of change. How do you know when something has changed? Why do things change? They worked in groups to come up with answers to these questions on a piece of chart paper and then sort their ideas into different categories. Ask them about what they put on their chart!
Later, after lunch, we watched a read-aloud of The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown. This book follows a pattern to explain why different objects are important. After discussing this pattern and looking at examples, we were able to write our own version about ourselves and what makes us important. They had to brainstorm some physical, personality, and unique traits that they have and then use those traits to write their poem. We are going to hang these poems up in our classroom, so we can admire our work, but they will come home with them later in the week!
We ended our day by thinking about times in our own lives that we have changed and creating a list or timeline of those changes. We will use this list throughout the week to help us work on our autobiographical writing! Ask them about what events they felt were important enough to include in their timeline.