Multigenre Memoir Observations Day 2

10-28-08

Today, students finished their planning. They picked four of their memories that they really wanted to write about and began making the hard decisions. They had to decide which genre(s) they wanted to use to write about each memory and then write a 1-2 sentence statement explaining why they
had made that specific genre choice. (These statements about genre choice later become part of their author's notes in the final product.) After I modeled this part of the process, I just walked around the room and observed, stopping to help students at this juncture who seemed particularly stumped. For example, one of my students lost her baby brother several years ago to a tragic accident--he was run over by a family member in the driveway. This student at first wanted to write an obituary to show her memory. In her rationale, she wrote, "Obituaries are how we show that someone died." When I talked to her about the genre format, she realized that an obituary would really only tell us a few facts--when and
where he died, birth and death date, surviving family members, date, time, and
place of the services. She decided to do the obituary and discuss the genre's limitations in her author's notes. She decided to further explore that memory through a diary entry because "it will let me talk about the details and my feelings."I was so excited today! Students were authentically discussing genre and author purpose and features, a major and more-difficult-to-teach English 9
SCOS goal! They were thinking like authors! Once we completed this thinking process, students each shared a genre they had chosen to show a particular memory and briefly told why. This sharing caused a few students to go back to their lists and revise. They had been inspired by other's choices. I do need to explain that students had 6 categories of genres to choose from and could only choose 1 genre from each category for the project. I felt that this step was important because, while still giving student choice, it kept students from entirely doing an art project or just a creative writing project. Students helped me create rubrics.

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