Writing Hooks

I've started a short story unit with my grade 9 English classes and am starting with the first line of a story: the hook.
As a class we've gone to the library and browsed through many books finding first lines we like and dislike. We've discussed our lines with each other and come up personal definitions of what makes a good hook. We've looked at different types of hooks and have now tried our hand at writing our own.
Our hooks are based on this idea for a story: You've inherited a mysterious object from a relative you didn't even know you had. Each of us wrote 5 hooks and chose 1 that we thought was our best. I've compiled each class' best hooks into the following forms.
We would appreciate if you could take a few minutes and give us feedback on our writing.

Class 1


Class 2


Class 3

Tournament of Words: September

Today I held my first Tournament of Words in my three grade nine English classes. I wasn't sure exactly how it would go, since it is the first of my "out there" ideas that I'm using in my class.
In reading we always come across new words. The project is to take at least one of those words, whether encountered in English class, other classes or outside school, with its context and definition, and submit it for the tournament. Students get to vote on which words they like best and each month a winner is crowned. This way when one person learns a word the whole class gets an opportunity to learn it.

I introduced this at the start of the month as a year-long activity. Since it wasn't of immediate concern a fair bunch of students promptly forgot about it. I had two words submitted by the end of last week. This Monday, I reminded them of the upcoming tournament  (AND the expectations) and have had many more submissions as the week progressed. I made a few concessions this month, since students are still learning about how this project works: scouring the dictionary was accepted and I gave some time at the start of class today.

I used random.org/lists to  fill the brackets and better bracket maker to conduct each tournament.

First Period

Winner: Stadstimmertuinen - found in Anne Frank's Diary.
I'm pretty sure they voted for it just because they wanted to keep hearing me struggle to pronounce it.
I was happy to see pulchritudinous get so far.
For the final vote I had everyone close their eyes and vote for the winner and then did a mystery reveal.

Fourth Period

Winner: lapping - found in Killing Mr. Griffin.
This class is pretty small, so students find two words each during the month. I added the word of the day from both Merriam Webster and Dictionary.com to round out the tournament to 24 teams. It feels like a nicer number somehow.
One vote ended in a tie, so the contributors of Alzheimer's and xenophobia played rock-paper-scissors to determine which word advanced.

Fifth Period

Winner: wryly - found in Killing Mr. Griffin.
I thought it interested that both vehement and ardent were submitted, as the definition for each word contained the other!
There were definite favourite words in this class. All the quarter-final votes were landslides or shut outs.

Main Difficulty: None of my classes are powers of 2. For the first class I limited entries to the first 16 words submitted. In the following classes the list randomizer determined which words got byes.
I'm thinking of giving prizes to the people who contributed the winning words in hopes of getting students to submit extra entries. The more words they discover the more chances to win. After all the required entries are in, the remaining spots are first come first served until 32 words have been submitted.

Literature Playing Cards

I made these this week:



I've used papers before to sort students into groups at the start of class. Everyone either takes one as they come in or there is one at each desk. I did irreversible binomial chip flavours, ex. one person has "Salt and" the other has "Vinegar" and students had to find their partner. However; these were always hastily made before class (sometimes finished during!) and recycled shortly after. I wanted to make a permanent, more flexible solution.

Literature cards were born! This set is designed to have 36 cards, which divides easily into 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, and 12! I will shuffle them before class and give each student one to start and flexible grouping is a breeze.

• I want groups of four? Everyone pair up with people with the same number.
• Four large groups? Everyone make a group of the same suit.
• Groups of three? Ace to 3 of Hearts here, ace to 3 of Yodas here, etc.

The backs of every card are going to evenly, and randomly be made six different colours. These colours allow me to:

• Make groups of six.
• Have each colour represent a certain point of view to take when responding to a text

Since I will be teaching grade 9 and 10 English this year, I want to really get my students excited for all that the world of literature has to offer. With these cards I hope to introduce students to some iconic genres and characters from literature, and hopefully make them curious too!
The traditional four suits are replaced by four genres:

• Hearts - Romance. I chose to use Jane Austen characters and quotes.
• Yodas - SciFi/Fantasy. I love this genre. It excites the imagination and is filled with allegory and social commentary.
• Magnifying Glasses - Mystery/Detective. It's easy to be drawn into a Who-Done-It. Foreshadowing abounds and reading can easily be connected to the glut of crime procedurals on TV.
• Masks - Drama. I chose Shakespeare quotes and characters since he is The icon of drama. This is language as art in an ideally non-written form.

Each genre has three face cards:

• King - An influential male character.
• Queen - An influential female character.
• Joker - A fool/jokester.

I wanted to give equal weight to male and female so chose to use the joker instead of the jack, as the joker represents a different mode of being within the genre.

I will most likely have less than 36 students in my class and I'll tailor which cards I use to that number. If I have 28 students I'll remove the 5s and 6s for example.

I'm excited to give them a try. If you like the idea and want your own, click here and download them from my flickr set. They are creative commons, so please reference me and don't use them to make a profit.

Tournament of Words

I love words and learning new ones (The last new word I came across was spall.) and have been thinking of how I can bring this enthusiasm into my classroom. One of my ideas is the "Tournament of Words"

• Each time a student encounters a new word in their reading they can submit it, with a definition and the sentence they encountered it in, to the monthly word pool.
• At the end of every month I'd share all the entries with the class and set up a bracket.
• Students then vote on every match up and decide which word ends up as the new word of the month.
• At the end of the year all monthly winners compete for the title of new word of the year.

I'm hoping this gets students excited about encountering new words.

I thought of using polls, like a Google Form, for doing this, but at the school I'm at that would mean booking the laptop cart and a lot of work setting up each draw and then making new polls (in class) for every subsequent round. So, I've decided on using the old school method of hands-up voting, with a web-based bracket that can keep track of each round easily.

I did a bit of searching around and found betterbracketmaker.com. It makes filling in brackets very easy. You type in all the entries in the first round and the rest is just clicking. Like this:

The one down side of Better Bracket Maker is that it only does powers of two: from 8 to 128. If I had 23 new words one month I'd be out of luck. So, either my timing would change from being strictly monthly to as soon as 32 words are submitted or I would have to use another site. printyourbrackets.com has fillable PDF brackets from 3 to 64 entries and every number in between. I could do a 23 word draw with this site, but have to manually type each entry in each round. I don' think I mind that too much though.

Do you think students would be interested in this? How do you build enthusiasm for expanding vocabulary?

Fakebook Update

Hot on the heels of making a twitter template for character studies, I've updated my fakebook template too!

Click on the picture to download!

Twitter Novel/Character Study

You may remember my enthusiasm for Literary Tweeters. I've started working on my courses for the upcoming year and here is the twitter activity I'm going to use with a novel study. The best tweets from each year will be used in a sporcle-style twitter review quiz for the following year. The twitter feed will be used to summarize the story and the extras: bio page, following, photos and videos, ads, recommended people and trending hashtags, will be used to shed light on the character they've picked to study. As an extension I would as students to make a "# Connect" page that follows one of the trending hashtags. This page would have people their character isn't following and would provide a different perspective on what is happening in the story. 

This project is similar to a facebook character study I made to use with Macbeth, however, this project is Word-based instead of using Publisher and is easier to use and modify. 

If you'd like a copy of the template click here.

My next project is going to be to use Word to update the facebook template to the Timeline layout.

Literary Tweeters

I've always liked the idea of connecting the study of literature to social media to get students to try and relate to the characters they are reading about. I've had students make facebook profiles for characters are we read through Macbeth.

I came across these two sporcle quizzes the other day and really liked them.

Macbeth does Twitter

Wuthering Heights On Twitter

These two quizzes get you to try and figure out which character would have written the tweet. I enjoyed the use of hashtags in the quizzes and the fact that the tweets are original, not just a short quote directly from the book.

They could be used as a summary or review if you studied either work, or as an activation if you were going to get students to create twitter feeds & profiles for characters in a work you are going to study.

I may make my own, but am hesitant because sporcle now has an 11 game limit. Hmm, what I think I'll do is show my students these games and introduce the twitter assignment, plus tell them that the tweets most fitting for each character will be featured in the game I make for next year's class. (Maybe I'll find a quiz/game-making site that doesn't have a restrictions by then.)

What would a tweet from your favourite literary character be?

Character Study Idea

How well do our students know the characters in the novels they are reading, or the historical figures they are studying? We could ask them to write a report or an essay, but what about getting our students to choose the character's theme song?
For example:

copyright Archie Comics
www.archiecomics.com

It would get students to engage with characters in new ways and forge connections between literature, or history, and their interests.

What would your favourite character's theme song be?

Writing - It's Not Just Essays

Our class' brainstorm of writing forms to use in content area courses. They'd probably be good for ELA too! ;)

Here is the list in regular table form too:

Poem Essay Blog Journal Entry Biography Wanted ad Persuasive Speech Press Conference Lecture Songs Story Short Story News Article Facebook Status update

Tweet Plays/Skits - monologue Myths/Legends Morality Tales/Parable Commercial Letter to editor Personal Letter SMS Encyclopaedia Dictionary Recipe Grocery List How to Interview

Brochure Memo Obit Magazine Graphic Novel Newsletter Diary Horoscope Sports broadcast Ransom Note Short Writing Critique Manual Autobiography

Writing From Memory

I attended a PD last week about a daily writing exercise that focuses on writing from memory. It only takes 15 minutes and then can form the basis of future writing. Students are given a trigger word, say shoes. You give them about three minutes to jot down as many memories they associate with shoes as they can. Then you ask them to pick the memory that stands out most in their mind. They single out that memory. You ask the students just to think about the memory, while you ask leading questions. For shoes it could be, "Are they new or old?", "Are they your shoes?", "Are you wearing them?", "What colour are they?". This gets them to examine the memory in more detail. Take about two minutes to do this. Then say, "Go!" or "Write!" or some equivalent and the students are to write for ten straight minutes. Their memory needs to be in the present tense and start with, "I am...".
Students are told not to erase anything, just keep going. Also, that if they hit an impasse or a block to doodle on the side. Keeping the pen moving keeps your brain moving and taking the pen off the paper can easily take your mental train off its rails. Also, spelling doesn't matter. Just write down your experience. At the end of the ten minutes have students finish the sentence they are writing and put down their pencils.
These drafts are saved for a week or two, to allow for the writers to become detached, and then reviewed. The students pick a piece from that week that they like and then work on revising and polishing it into a final piece.
The rationale is:

• This gets students into the habit of writing, because it is hard work.
• They are generating a lot of text, which increases fluency.
• They are learning how to develop detail in writing.
• The motivation to write is authentic as the topic is something important to each individual.
• It instils confidence.

An inspiration for this method was Lynda Berry's book What It Is. It is a graphic novel that outlines writing from memory, and is itself an example of it. There are two questions we frequently ask ourselves when writing:

1. Is this good?
2. Does this suck?

Both undermine our writing and Lynda suggests every time students (or ourselves as writers) we ask ourselves one of those questions we answer ourselves with

A first draft is never meant to be perfect or better than someone else's writing. It is solely to get our ideas out of our head and onto the page. I think it is a great way to practice writing and to get people who would classify themselves as non-writers interested in writing.

If you want to read more about it, or just want to check out an awesome graphic novel, click the book below and buy it!

picture from
http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/shopCatalogLong.php?st=art&art=a45a8141b837f5

Here's what I wrote (unedited) in the 8 minutes provided. The theme was shoes.

What If Isaac Newton Didn't See That Apple

Newton was a very bright man and wrote on a wide variety of subjects. Suppose on that fateful day something else caught his eye as he lounged in an orchard. Not an apple, but a book. Perhaps dropped by a worker in the orchard. Newton examines it, enthralled. A wind blows through the orchard loosing many apples. Thud, thud, thud, but he takes no notice. The book is a diary and chronicles the orchard man's daily life: work, family, hopes, dreams, failures, successes. Newton, captivated, wonders what laws govern writing and turns his scientific mind to the task.
He thinks, experiments, revises, and experiments again. Someone else is left to describe the laws of motion, but Newton gives the world:

The Three Laws of Writing

1. A pen in motion tends to stay in motion, while a pen at rest tends to stay at rest.
2. A final piece is the product of inspiration and perseverance.
3. Any energy a writer puts into a piece is met by equal and individual energy from the reader.

My ELA Identity

We had an assignment in my senior years ELA course to think about who we are and what that means as future teachers of English. It was a great way to reflect on the fact that who I am influences my teaching. I need to make the best of my strengths and focus on my weaknesses to reach all students across all learning styles/preferences. So, this is where ELA and I intersect.