Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 3, “The Story of You! An Invitation to Write and Explore Autobiography” (3rd-4th)
Happy Wednesday! Today, we began our day by thinking about someone who makes us feel special and thinking about why we love them. This came from a book called “Question a Day Journal for Kids” that they will get to keep and bring home with them on Friday! We are doing days 1 through 4 together this week, but they will have the other 361 days that they can do at home if they want to.
We spent the rest of the morning working on some autobiographical poems! We looked at examples in our workbooks of “Where I’m From” poems and then brainstormed some ideas about our own lives. We used the lists that we made about our lives to then fill in a template and write our own “Where I’m From” poems. They were able to write their final draft on a piece of construction paper as a way to publish it. Some people chose to read theirs aloud to the class, but all of them will be hung on the wall until Friday!
After lunch, our authors conducted interviews to better understand their classmates’ writing processes. They asked questions about what they like to write, when, and how often they would like to write. This gave them some insight into how other people think about writing and how it might be the same or different from their own thinking. They used their partners’ answers to write a short 1-paragraph biography about them and their writing!
To end the day, we focused our attention on starting our big memoir project! We decided on which memory we are going to write about yesterday, so today, we created a thought web to get down our ideas and as many details about the memory as we could. After we finished getting our ideas on paper, we began writing our first drafts! It can be hard to get started when it comes to writing, so we discussed how the important thing in a first draft is just getting words on the page. It probably won’t be great, and you might have some spelling errors or missing details, but the good news is we will spend tomorrow and Friday fixing those things and adding more information, so the only thing we need today is to make sure we have words on the page!