8C @ W Erskine Johnston PS

Hey!  Guess what?  Only 5 more sleeps ’til the holidays!  Woohoo!
For today’s lab time, you will be given an opportunity to post at least 1 rapid write to your blog.  For those who have posted rapid writes to your blog, please log in and approve the comments I left.  Those comments have your targets for [...]

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We continue to work on our memoirs this week.  Now that we have worked with our drafts, finding the most important moment and exploding it to add vivid details, we are ready to work on our leads and our endings.
Without an enticing and effective lead, the story is dead before it began.  The lead must [...]

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Today we will be moving from our personal memoir rapid writes to organizing the ideas using the memoir graphic organzer.  Students will begin by completing the RAFTS portion of the organizer.
Besides organizing our ideas, the graphic organizer will help us focus in on the central event of our memoir.
Once you have completed the organizer, go back [...]

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This week we will begin working on our narrative writing.  We are focusing on writing a memoir.  Memoirs are autobiographical in nature (they tell about the author’s life), but narrower in scope than a full autobiography.  Our memoirs are going to focus on a single memorable event in our lives.  To prepare, we will begin [...]

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Around the time I first started teaching, I came across a wonderful lesson idea in Rethinking our Classrooms:  Teaching for Equity and Justice, Volume 2.   The poem upon which the lesson is based is Where I’m From by George Ella Lyon.  Since using it back then with my Grade 9 students, I have come across [...]

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