Memoir

Today I introduced Memoir to my kids and it went great. We read two stories, The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant and What You Know First by Patricia Maclachlan. We talked about what is in our own notebooks. My students know what it is mine so together we looked through it and came up with 3 Life Themes. Then students looked into their notebooks and came up with their own themes. Tomorrow we are going to look at 3 different chapters of Knots on my Yo-Yo String by Jerry Spinelli. Our focus is to look at why people write memoir before we begin writing our own.

My 3 Themes that appear most often in my notebook are

1)My family-my daughters and days from my childhood
2)Remembering who I am-thoughts I have about myself and how I am growing
3)When my eldest daughter received the diagnosis-Mosaic Down syndrome