SOLSC Classroom Challenge

Classroom Slice of Life Story Challenge: Day 2 of 31

Anna Gratz Cockerille

Slice of Life_classroom image Black

It’s Day Two of the Classroom Slice of Life Story Challenge. Welcome back! If your students are struggling to find inspiration, it will certainly be a good idea to call on your previous teaching and remind them of all the strategies they know to generate ideas for personal narrative writing.

Some classic strategies:

  • Think of a person or a place that means a lot to you or has played a big role in your life. List moments you remember with that person or at that place. Choose one of those moments and write the story of it.
  • Think of strong emotions and list a few, such as anger, fear, embarrassment. Then, list times that you felt that emotion under each one. Choose one of the moments and write the story of it.

Encourage your writers to try out a couple of different stories before choosing one that they will write as a Slice of Life story. Also, by generating lists of ideas instead of just jumping into writing a story, they will be collecting ideas for future posts.

If you have strategies that worked particularly well to help your students to generate ideas, feel free to share them along with the permalink to your students’ posts in the comments section.

Useful Links:

Discover more from TWO WRITING TEACHERS

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Unknown's avatar

Published by Anna Gratz Cockerille

Anna is a staff developer, literacy coach, and writer, based in New York City. She taught internationally in places such as Sydney, Australia; San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and Auckland, New Zealand in addition to New York before becoming a staff developer for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University (TCRWP). She has been an adjunct instructor in the Literacy Specialist Program at Teachers College, and teaches at TCRWP where she helps participants bring strong literacy instruction into their classrooms. Anna recently co-wrote Bringing History to Life with Lucy Calkins, part of the 2013 series Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing (Heinemann). She has been a researcher for Lucy Calkins, contributing especially to Pathways to the Common Core (Heinemann, 2012) and Navigating Nonfiction (Heinemann, 2010).

46 thoughts on “Classroom Slice of Life Story Challenge: Day 2 of 31”

  8. I have a small cohort of eager middle school writers participating in this challenge with me this year. There are about 10 of them, some doing journal versions of the challenge, but a few volunteered to stay after school today to learn about blogging. It’s literally their first day with their blogs. I’m guessing we’ll have more of a “round-up” as they get the hang of it.

    We’re going slow and encourage community amongst themselves right now. I do hope to have them make some connections to other student writers throughout the month. Do you have your students come here to TWT and find other blogs to comment on? Just curious what has worked well for you?

    Thanks!

    http://amandacornwell.edublogs.org/2015/03/02/classroom-slice-round-up-231/

    Like

  18. I’m finding that my students can only respond to classrooms using KidBlog as they do not have emails. The other accounts ask for a profile. Is that how the other classrooms are seeing this? Thanks!

    Like

    1. Hi, Colleen,
      This is my first year trying the Classroom Challenge. Yesterday was Sunday, today was a teacher workday. My fourth and fifth graders will do their first SOLs tomorrow. I understand that my best plan is to link to other classrooms who are on Kidblogs since we are, too. Could we add your class to our Blogroll? Would you be willing to add us. (4th and 5th gifted/talented students from Bluffton, South Carolina). Please reply, or contact me via Kidblogs. http://kidblog.org/GTDotConnectors2015/

      Like

Comments are closed.