Classroom Slice of Life Story Challenge: Day 26 of 31

CLASSROOM SLICE OF LIFE STORY CHALLENGE: DAY 26 OF 31

Welcome to Day 26!

As I’ve been reading all month long, I’ve been enjoying all the stories about kids’ lives. Hanging out with friends, fights with siblings, grandma’s cooking, weekend trips with the family… and every once in a while a kid will actually write a story about something that happened at school.

School can be a source for finding GREAT ideas for stories. It’s hard for kids to imagine, but outside the walls of their building, people are REALLY interested in what they have to say about what’s happening on a day-day basis in their building. Tell your kids not to assume that any of us already know what goes on in there!

Another reason to write about what happened at school today: Kids think they will never forget their teachers, or what classes were like, but eventually they will. Writing some of those stories now, as they are happening, is an amazing gift to give themselves.

If anybody is stuck for an idea to write about during the last few days of the challenge, it might be a nice strategy to make a timeline of everything that happened today (or this week) in school.

Len, a student from the class blog Writing Our Own Words, wrote this great slice about science a few days ago:

Day before yesterday, I did 2 experiments in science classes.

One was in physics and one was in chemistry. In physics, we learned about static electricity, and my teacher had van de graff generator. It is giant silver ball that’s on top of pole connected and electricity is charged by connecting to a consent [sic]. When my teacher put [his] finger close to it, little lighting appears between him and the machine. Next thing he did was put a thing kind of like a furry blanket and it floated, then he put stack of plastic cups upside down. Suddenly plastic cups start floating 1 cup at a time. Then we made a circle by holding the person’s hand that’s next to me. Teacher put his hand on machine and bolt goes through everyone’s body as my elbow blocked. It actually hurts. Everyone and me were saying my elbow hurts.

In Chemistry and he had some liquid that was very low boiling point so he had big container that keeps it really cold. When teacher got that liquid out of container, it starts boiling and producing lots of white cold moisture cold gas. He put balloon inside of it then it deflated and it got hard. When he took out, it became same size as before. Then he put rubber ball that inside is air, it became like a rock and he through to a wall then it cracked in half. Then he poured that liquid to a desk and instead of making things wet, if just became white moisture gas. ( I think the liquid was nitrogen but not sure)

Usually in science we just take notes and learn stuff but that day it was a special day and lab was one of the best ones we’ve done.

I love the details that Len includes, and that he writes about what happened during science class as a narrative, not just a report.

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.

Happy Slicing!

WRITE a slice of life story on your own blog.

SHARE a link to your post in the comments section.

GIVE comments to at least three other SOLSC Classroom bloggers.

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