Today I started my third week of the school year, and yesterday was a great day to refocus and reevaluate my plans for the quarter. It is my second year teaching in a reading and writing workshop setting. Though I learned a lot from my experiences last year, there is still a lot more to learn. I found myself reflecting on some basic foundational steps that I forgot from the start of last year. Each year I have to remind myself to remember back to how 6th graders are at the start of the year, rather than my fresh memories at the end of the year. It has been a lot smoother with my 7th and 8th graders who have already been in my class for a year or two.
Many genre studies fall into the areas where I still want to improve a lot. This quarter we will be focusing on personal narrative. I have a lot of resources to draw from, and I am writing with my students. However, yesterday I felt myself getting frustrated by not having enough mentor texts in my classroom library. It was becoming very apparent that I do not have very much non-fiction, and out of that portion of my classroom library, there is even less first person narrative style non-fiction.
Then it hit me that my concept of personal narrative defined as non-fiction was too narrow. I thought of all the great first person narrative style writing in my fiction section, often filled with excellent examples of voice. Today I was reading Mark Overmeyer's Original Author Tip Tuesday on the Stenhouse blog and received some affirmation of this thought when he mentioned that Jeff Kinney's The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series are excellent to spark ideas for personal narrative.
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