Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 4, “The Story of You! An Invitation to Write and Explore Autobiography” (3rd-4th)
Welcome to day 4 of the Story of You! Our day started with a great discussion of what our favorite books are. This came from our daily question book, but allowed us to hear from each other about books and reading, and why the book we chose is our favorite. No one had the same favorite as another person, so we got to learn about a lot of books!
After that, we watched a short film called “Hair Love”. It follows a little girl who tries to do her hair on her own and can’t figure it out, so she needs her dad’s help. Mom was usually the one doing her hair, so Dad feels just as lost as the little girl does, but eventually they figure it out, and her hair turns out great! As a way to experiment with different forms of storytelling, after watching the film, they were challenged to turn the film version into a written story version. It was so interesting to see which details they each focused on and the differences in their writing, even though they had the same source material.
When we got back from ORA, we took time to work on our rough drafts that we started at the end of the day yesterday. We went over the expectations for their memoirs again, and they were able to get to work. Their memoirs should be focused on one moment in their lives, and their storytelling should be focused around a theme. They are aiming to write at least 2 pages, but are welcome to write more if they want to! Once rough drafts were finished, they did a self-review and a peer review to check for ways to improve their writing. They then had some time to make those edits before we moved on to the next activity.
We spent our afternoon analyzing some exemplar writing from our workbooks. One was a short autobiography about someone who loves dogs, and the other was about someone’s library. Both were written in unique ways and allowed us to see new types of writing and think about how it could be better and what was already done well. We ended our day by thinking of a title for our memoirs and designing a cover for our writing!
Throughout the week, we have been doing some riddles as our brain breaks, and they are loving them, so I wanted to pass along how to find them. If you go to YouTube and search for TedEd riddles, there is a playlist with dozens that you guys can watch and try to solve together!