Join the Fourth Annual Classroom Slice of Life Story Challenge!

This March marks the fourth year of the classroom version of the Slice of Life Story Challenge, or Classroom SOLSC. We hope that many of you will join the challenge with your classes! We believe the benefit will be huge for your classroom community and for your students’ writing lives.

Teachers and students who have participated in past challenges tell us that they experience a huge increase in engagement with writing. Students’ stories will be read and commented on by other classrooms across the globe.  The Classroom Challenge is a wonderful way to grow writers, and to have them experience the benefits (and the thrill!) of a wider audience.  If you’d like to start planting seeds for March’s Classroom challenge, you may be interested in my post for ideas on ways to prepare.

The following information will help you to plan for the set-up and execution of the challenge. It’s not difficult (we promise!) and the reward will be far worth the effort.

If you haven’t already done so, please commit to participating in the month-long adult Slice of Life Story Challenge. It is crucial that you are writing alongside your students, serving as a role model of the writing life.  Participating in the challenge will inspire you to do a lot of writing so you can mentor your students, especially the ones who are having trouble getting started.  Please remember that a slice of life story is a narrative that grows out of an ordinary moment from one’s day.  Slice of life stories are about finding deeper meaning in the seemingly small events of daily life. For more on what constitutes a slice of life story, click here. 

Here’s an infographic Beth created to help writers visualize the process:

Getting Started

Here is the essential information you’ll need to participate in our Classroom Slice of Life Story Challenge.

First of all, what’s a permalink?

When someone visits the main page of your blog, the most recent post is generally what they see first. The url for this generally remains the same no matter what. But, when someone clicks on a particular post, each particular post has a unique url–this is the permalink. For the challenge, each day you will simply copy and paste the permalink that is tied to the specific post for the day.

You can locate the permalink of your any of your posts by clicking on the title of the post. Then copy and paste the unique web address from the address bar at the top of your browser.  That’s the URL you should use when linking to your class’s slice of life stories.  Linking to your class’s slices for the day with a unique URL is important since it makes it possible for others to return to that day’s slices even after you’ve posted new things on your blog. (For further instruction on how to do this, click here. Stacey posted wonderful visual examples of this in her post this week.)

Okay, we’re in. How do we participate in the Classroom Slice of Life Story Challenge?

• If your students are posting slice of life stories (slices) from their personal blogs, please have them link their blog posts to your blog and then share the unique URL (permalink) to the location of the “round up” of student slices
• You’ll share your STUDENTS’ writing each day on the daily CLASSROOM Slice of Life Challenge Post, which will go live every day at 12:00 a.m. EST.  Look for the post that says “Classroom SOLSC: (#) of 31”. Link your students’ posts from your blog to the daily call for classroom slice of life stories using the permalink of the daily round-up of their slices on your blog.
• Be sure to post the link to YOUR OWN slice of life story on the daily call for the adult challenge, which will go live at 12:01 a.m. daily.
• Encourage your students to leave comments for other classes who are slicing. One of the reasons we started a classroom challenge last year was so we could connect classroom writing communities around the world.  Whenever possible, encourage your students to comment on at least three other students’ slices, from other schools, every day.
• You can also encourage students to follow a few other slicers’ blogs from other schools throughout the challenge so they can make a virtual connection with another young writers over the course of the month.
• Please use the SAME e-mail and user name information every time you post a link to your class’s entries.  User name consistency will help you (and your class) be recognized by other teachers (and classes).
• If you use Twitter, consider posting the link to your students’ slices on your personal or classroom Twitter account. Use the hashtags #sol15 and to get your students slices noticed by more people.
• At the bottom of this post, you will see that we have beautiful buttons for both the adult challenge and the classroom challenge, in both English and Spanish. The button represents the slice of life – a small segment out of one’s day. We would love it if you would paste the button at the top of your page when you post. To download the button, right-click on the image you would like to use and select as “save as.” You can then insert this image into your SOLSC related posts!

Inspiring Your Writers

Here are some ideas to help you launch the challenge with your students: 

• You might show them some of last year’s student posts, ideally on a screen, so they can see how professional the writing looks when posted on a blog.
• You might read some of your own slice of life story writing to set the tone that you are all part of a writing community.
• You might give them new notebooks or teach them how to use a digital note-taking program to inspire them. For more on digital note-taking, see Stacey’s post here.
• You might start with an inspiring quote on writing such as:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things about all others:  read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you. ~Stephen King

Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me”. ~Jhumpa Lahiri

Resources and Safety

Click here to go to that post so you can download helpful resources compiled by Stacey. This includes parent letters about the challenge and a spreadsheet for tracking which students write daily.

Here’s another useful link for protecting your students’ identities online using a cool method called image-stamping.

Remember to keep it safe for your students. The Classroom Slice of Life Challenge takes place in the public domain. Anyone will be able to access the link to your blog, which will serve as the landing page where you’ll round-up your students’ daily slice of life stories. Please make sure your students are using pseudonyms and aren’t disclosing identifying information.

An important note

We realize that some of you might have a child or a student who you’d like to invite to do the Slice of Life Story Challenge alongside you. If this is the case, then we invite your children or individual students to participate in the Classroom Slice of Life Story Challenge. As of this year, individuals under the age of 18 who are not part of a classroom community must have an adult sponsor to participate. As an adult sponsor, you will be the person who leaves the link to your child’s or student’s blog post, on their behalf, on the daily call for Classroom Slice of Life stories. We believe that this policy ensures that children participating in the challenge are doing so with supervision and guidance as to the content of their slices.  Should you have questions about this new policy, please contact Beth, Betsy, Dana, or Stacey (based on the letter of your last name, as specified in Stacey’s overview post on Monday).

Additional Information

Remember, we are not offering prizes for the classroom challenge.  It is up to you to provide prizes for your own students. For more thoughts on that topic, click here. 

For more tips about running a fantastic classroom challenge, check out Amanda Cornwell and Beth Scanlon’s guest blog posts. Each of them has run an online classroom SOLSC. You should also check out a post about Ruth Metcalfe’s class and how she got her students excited to take on the challenge. All of these blog posts are valuable and will help you think about exactly how you want to execute the challenge in your classroom.

During the Classroom Slice of Life Challenge there are four of us coordinating the event who can answer questions and help to solve problems: Deb, Kathleen, Anna, and myself. Here is our contact information:

• If your last name begins with the letters A – G, please email questions to Anna, AnnaGCockerilleLiteracy{at}gmail.com.

• If your last name begins with the letters H – M, please email questions to Deb, DebFrazier4{at}gmail.com.

• If your last name begins with the letters N – S, please email questions to Kathleen, mrs.sokolowski{at}gmail.com.

• If your last name begins with the letters T – Z, please email questions to Tara, elibenoli5{at}gmail.com.

Have fun!  Enjoy this writing journey with your students.

Questions about the Classroom Slice of Life Challenge?  Please leave a comment.