Strategies
Using images, I would like to start out the school year by using portraits and self-portraits from the on-line application Art Authority each morning as a writing warm-up. Students working in pairs will be asked to look at the pictures they see and write about them. They are to look at color, clothes, hair, eyes, expression, and background to create a story about the subject. We will continue this activity when students are introduced to each fugitive slave narrative. Each narrator will have photographs or illustrations on websites that are listed under the appendix. Students will follow the same elements for writing about each narrator before they read about who they are. Finally, they will be drawing images from these slave narratives in the form of a story board by imagining what a day in the narrators life would look like and from these images, write a short narrative.
Using text, I will introduce autobiography and memoir using mentor texts to read aloud to the class. We will pull out parts of the story and list the elements of each on chart paper. I will use read alouds to compare two biographies of Frederick Douglass and create a Venn diagram to record the differences and similarities in each story. We will discuss the elements of each biography to decipher what biography is and is not. Students will work together with other biographies to compare and contrast differences between texts. We will read together fugitive slave narratives and discuss the elements of narrative, including whether a narrative is a form of biography.
Using speaking and listening skills, I will model interviewing another person using questions created by the class to show selection. Students will practice interviewing another student in small groups. I will assign four students to a group, two of whom will write a short biography about an identified "subject" in the group. While they are writing, a third student will interview the subject, or fourth student, and write a short biography. The fourth student will write a short autobiography while the group is writing. The three will then share out their biographies to the class, showing how different each one can be and the subject will share his autobiography for comparison. Finally, students will interview a family member after understanding the elements of biography.
Using writing skills, students will write a descriptive story about a memorable experience in their life. This memoir should include an incident that they want to share in class and include the elements we have identified. Using the fugitive slave narratives and their imagination, students will write what a day in the narrator's life might have been like when they were escaping to freedom. Finally, students will practice writing short biographies of classmates using the above strategies to complete their final writing piece, which will be a short graphic biography of a family member.
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