Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 2, “The Story of You! An Invitation to Write and Explore Autobiography” (3rd-4th)
Our second day was a busy one! We began our day by thinking about things that make us happy and learned a little bit more about each other through it. After that, we read a short story called Ghost Cat. This is a story about a family who moves to the English countryside after their dad passed away. One of the kids begins telling stories about a cat that is wandering the property, but no one else ever sees it. We were able to learn about story elements and imagery while reading this heartfelt story.
After ORA, we thought about our own lives a little bit more in order to prep for our memoir writing this week. The students thought about their life and made lists of their family, friends, vacations they’ve taken, sports they’ve played, and information about their schools. This brainstorming was to help them think about what important events might’ve happened, including these different categories and what they might want to write about later in the week.
Next, we watched a short film about someone’s very unlucky day. It can be hard to write a memoir because we get stuck trying to think of some great event that was a once-in-a-lifetime scenario, but not every memoir has to be like that! They worked in groups to create skits depicting someone’s very normal but very unlucky day. They had things go wrong like stepping on Legos, burning your toast, and missing the school bus. Each group performed the skits in front of each other and other SAVY staff.
To end our day, we had a quick discussion about theme and why it is important to center a story around a theme. We looked back at our lists of memories that we made yesterday and narrowed them down to our favorite 3 that we might want to write about. They had to brainstorm what theme they could use to center their stories around. Theme is a challenging topic, and for some of them, this was their first interaction with the concept, so we spent a lot of time talking about and thinking about which themes would work best for our different ideas. They then mapped out a quick outline for each of the 3 memories to decide if they really had enough happening in the memory to write a full story about it. They talked with partners to discuss which story would be the most exciting to read before narrowing down to the memory they want to include in their memoir! Ask them about their ideas and which memory they ended up going with. It might surprise you which ones really stuck with them! As a bonus, if you can find some pictures or objects that go with this memory, they are more than welcome to bring those in for the rest of the week to help them with their writing.