Essential Question: What is spoken word poetry and how can you use it to write about things that are relevant to you?

Agenda:

Please name today's document "Intro to Spoken Word Poetry" and follow the instructions on the slides. Answer any questions in your document for today. 

Reminder: This is the last unit for this school year. We will be working on your poetry on May 5 and 7, which will be your last assignments. All work is due by Friday, May 15. 

Assignments:

• Spoken Word Poetry Definition
• Responses to Ted Talk
• List of 10 things you know to be true
• Button Poetry Response(Link to Button Poetry Classroom List, here)

SCHEDULE OVERVIEW UNTIL MAY 15:

Hey, all! Here's a quick overview of the last assignments that will be due until May 15 by week. Please add these to your planners/calendars:

WEEK OF APRIL 27 - MAY 1:

• Tuesday, April 28: Mistake Essay Final Draft
• Thursday, April 30: Intro to Spoken Word Poetry

WEEK OF MAY 4 - 8 (THIS IS THE LAST WEEK YOU'LL BE GETTING NEW ASSIGNMENTS, YAY!):

• Tuesday, May 5: Spoken Word Poetry Draft
• Thursday, May 7: Spoken Word Poetry Final

WEEK OF MAY 11 - 15

• No new assignments. Make sure you have completed and turned in ALL of your work by midnight on Friday, May 15

Essential Question: How do you use sensory detail and editing techniques to elevate your writing?

Agenda: 
1. Pick a boring or bland sentence from your Mistake Essay. Write it down. Then, rewrite this sentence and add sensory details to make this sentence more vivid and interesting. Avoid cliches. 

2. Check the rest of your Mistake Essay for bland or boring sentences and see if you can add more detail or tighten them.

3. Revise your draft and pay attention to the following:

• Make sure to either start with reflection or a moment of action. 
• Are you showing, rather than telling your reader what happened? 
• Heighten the three key details you highlighted in your rough draft. Make sure they are emphasized in your essay and you show that they are important. 
• Do you in equal parts express what happened and reflect on what you learned from it/what this says about you as a person? 
• Is your closing effective? End with something that sums up what this mistake meant to you or an outlook to the future/whether you would do it again or not. 

4. Run your draft through Hemingway and check where you can use fewer adverbs or shorter sentences.

5. Check spelling, capitalization, and grammar using Grammarly.

6. Reflection (add to the bottom of your draft): 

• What are the strengths of your essay? What did you struggle with or think could improve? 
• What was the hardest part of this essay to write? Why? 
• Did anything about this essay or the way you wrote it surprise you? 

Assignments: 

• Submit your final draft to Mistake Essay Final Draft on Canvas

Essential Question: How can you use expressive and reflective writing to write a personal essay?

Agenda:
1. Finish writing the rough draft of your Favorite Mistake Essay.
Use Jessanne Collins "A Mistake That Should Last a Lifetime" as a model for both length and detail. Use your expression vs. reflection organizer from last period as an outline and guide.

Favorite Mistake Essay Requirements: 

• Include both what happened (expression) and what you learned from it/ how it changed you (reflection) 
• Your essay should be between 500-700 words long.
• Follow a similar structure as the Jessanne Collins essay.
• Show rather than tell: include all five senses to really bring your story to life.

2. Highlight 3 important details in your essay.
Make sure to describe these important details in a unique, non-cliched way. Show instead of telling and try to use all of your five senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch) in your description.

3. Peer-review your essay with a partner. This can be another student, a friend, or a family member. Ask them to leave comments on the following:

• Spelling and Grammar
• What is working well?
• What is confusing?
• What would you want to see more of?

4. Address and fix the feedback you  got on your essay.

Assignments:
Your assignment for today is titled "Mistake Essay Rough Draft" on Canvas

• Submit your rough draft with your peer feedback (If you do not get to your peer feedback this period, do this at the beginning of next period)

Essential Question: How can you combine expressive and reflective writing to write a personal essay?
​
Agenda: 
1. For 10 minutes, write about the following:

• How has your life changed in the past month, since we moved to social distancing, quarantine, and online learning?
• How do you think you will look back to this time five years from now?

2. Take a second look at Jessanne Collins' "A Mistake That Should Last a Lifetime." Copy/paste it into today's Google Doc.

Highlight in one color her reflective writing, in which she talks about what she learned from her mistake and how she views it today. 
In a different color, highlight her expressive writing, that is her writing about what happened when she made her mistake. 

5. Complete the Favorite Mistake Essay Organizer, filling in your reflective writing (what you learned from your mistake and what it means to you today) on one side, and your expressive writing (what actually happened when you made your mistake) on the other. 

6. Begin rough drafting your Mistake Essay. It should be between 500-700 words long and contain both what happened (expressive writing) and what you learned from it/how it changed you (reflective writing). 

Mistake Essay Requirements: 

• Include both what happened (expression) and what you learned from it/ how it changed you (reflection) 
• Your essay should be between 500-700 words long.
• Follow a similar structure as the Jessanne Collins essay.
• Show rather than tell: include all five senses to really bring your story to life.

​
Assignments:

• Writing Prompt
• Jessanne Collins highlights (copy/paste this into your GoogleDoc for today)
• Expression vs. Reflection Graphic Organizer (copy/paste into your GoogleDoc)
• Rough Draft beginning of your Mistake Essay

​Hi, all! 

Just wanted to give you a quick heads up that I'm not posting a new assignment for you all today, so that you can use the rest of the week to catch up on any work you are missing. Mid-terms are tomorrow, Friday, April 17, so please get what work you can in by then to get caught up as much as possible. 

All assignments will stay open until May 15, 2020 and I'm not penalizing any late work, but please make sure to get caught up as much as possible in a timely manner to avoid getting overwhelmed at the end of the quarter.

If you have any questions, please reach out to me via Canvas or sfloch@graniteschools.org.

I hope you all are well and staying safe.

Much love,
Mx. Floch

Essential Question: How do you write both narratively and reflectively about events from your life?

Agenda:

1. Write for 10 minutes about the follow picture:

​2. Reflection: How are you the sum of your influences? How are you not? 
Write for 5 minutes. 

3. Think of a mistake you made in your life that you have learned from. What was it? What did you learn? 

4. Copy into your document and cold read Jessane Collins' A Mistake That Should Last a Lifetime.
What stands out to you? Include some notes on the bottom of your document.

5. Spend 15 minutes talking to the text. Comment and highlight to create at least three of the following:

• comments (details that stood out to you and why)
• connections (how can you connect this to your own life, something else you've read, or the wider world around you?)
• questions (What does this make you wonder or question?)

Be prepared to share your annotations in your group and with the rest of the class. 

6. Write for 10-15 minutes about a mistake you learned from. Aim for 200-300 words for your rough draft. 

Assignments:

• Writing Prompt
• Reflection on Influences 
• Mistake brainstorming question
• "A Mistake That Should Last a Lifetime" annotations
• Mistake quickwrite

Essential Question: How can you tighten and strengthen your writing through self-editing?

Agenda:
Revise your flash fiction piece. Follow these steps: 

1. Tighten and simplify your writing. Here are some tips to make your writing stronger.

2. Condense your word count to make sure you can fit everything into 300 words (yes, this is hard, but try to get as close as you possibly can; the point of this assignment is to be precise but evocative in your language): 
First, go through and delete all unnecessary adverbs and adjectives. 
Then, make sure you are not talking about anything that does not directly pertain to your story. 

• Does your story still make sense? 
• Does your story have explicit as well as implicit meaning? 

If your answer is "Yes" to both of these, proceed to the next step. 

3. Go through your story and make sure that every word you used is necessary. Shorten anything that could be tightened. 

4. Follow these three steps to amplify your significant details

1. Highlight the three most important details in your story.
2. What is the explicit significance of these details? What’s their implicit significance? 
3. Describe your significant details as vividly as possible. Try to use your 5 senses to come up with unique descriptions that aren’t cliche. 

5. How can you make things stronger, worse or unexpected?

6. Are there any cliches in your story? Either change them or twist them to make them more original. ​

7. Share your work with someone else. This could be a family member, a friend, or another student from this class. Make sure their feedback to you answers the following questions: 

• What is something you really liked? 
• What confused you? 
• What do you want to see more of? 

8. Use your partner's feedback to revise your story. 

9. Proofread your story twice. Run it through Grammarly to check for spelling and grammatical errors.

10. Self-Assessment/Reflection: 

• What are the strengths of your story? 
• What do you feel you still need to improve in your story? 
• What about the writing process of this story came to you easily? 
• What did you struggle with? How did you overcome this struggle? 
• What did you learn from writing your flash fiction piece? 
• What would you change next time?

Format your story as following: 

• Give your story a title (this will not count towards your 300 words); center your title
• Below the title, center your full name
• Format the entire story in 12 point Times New Roman, single-spaced
• Title your reflection and add it below your flash fiction piece 

Title your Doc "Flash Fiction Final Draft" and upload it to CANVAS.  

Assignments: 

• Upload final draft of your flash fiction piece and reflection to CANVAS

Essential Question: How can you edit your flash fiction piece to narrow it down to the key moment that shows your character's goal/motivation/conflict and how can you edit your work to show, rather than tell?

Agenda: 
1. Writing Prompt: Write about a moment where your character isn't doing anything, but write about them and their surroundings in as much detail as possible. Write for 7 minutes.

2.  Character Goal, Motivation, and Conflict:

• What is your main character’s main goal?
  • External (What is something physical or tangible your character wants?)
  • Internal (What is something psychological or emotional your character wants?)
• What is your main character’s motivation?
  • External (Why does your character want this tangible thing?)
  • Internal (Why does your character want this emotional thing?)
• What is your character’s main conflict?
  • External (What is a person or outside force trying to stop or antagonize your character?)
  • Internal (What is something mental or emotional within your character that's trying to stop them?)

3. In your story, what is the ONE MOMENT that shows as much as possible of your character's goal, motivation, and conflict? List this moment, then rewrite your flash fiction piece to focus on JUST that moment. Any previous backstory may be hinted at or included in one to two details, but shouldn't be the main plot of your story. See how you can fold as much as possible into that one moment and show what is happening and what this means to your character, rather than tell.

4. To help you show, rather than tell, watch the following video (up to the 6:29 minute mark):

5. Use the tips in the video above to rewrite and revise your work to show, rather than tell. Make sure to really take us into the moment you have chosen as the plot for your story. Limit anything else, but use all five of your senses and decide on specific, sensory details to include. Try to keep your draft as close to 300 words as possible, but we will spend next time honing it down to 300 words. 
​
Assignments: 

• Submit the revised draft of your flash fiction story. We will add finishing touches next time. 

Essential Question: How do you use word choice and story structure to draft a flash fiction story?

Agenda:
1. Writing Prompt: For 10 minutes, write a story using the following picture prompt:

2. Write your rough draft of your flash fiction piece. Pay close attention to the following:

• Use both explicit and implicit characterization
• Use unique, non-cliche significant details
• Make sure your story focuses on a moment of action
• Make sure your story has a beginning, middle, and end
• While your final draft should be 300 words exactly (no more, no less), don’t worry about your overall word count in this first draft. Just tell the story.

3. Exit Ticket:

• What inspired the idea for your flash fiction story?
• What was your process for writing it?
• What is something you really like about your story?
• What's something you want to improve about your story?

Assignments:

• Writing Prompt
• Flash Fiction Rough Draft
• Exit Ticket​