Day 2: Memoirs, Writing Circles, and Professional Literature

We returned this morning, ready to write and engage in the activities that Jan and Amy prepared for us.  After reviewing the day's agenda, Katrina and Iris shared the texts that they selected for a read aloud.

Katrina read an excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.  This book is incredibly significant to her, being the first novel she wanted to fully read in high school.  The book's content strongly connected to an experience Katrina had during her adolescence, and she credits it as the text that helped her (finally) enjoy reading.  In fact, the words  "So it goes" are tattooed to Katrina's foot as a permanent reminder of Mr. Vonnegut's inspiring message.

Iris shared two texts: a Children's ministry Bible and the children's book Dinorella. Iris explained how the Bible connected to her religious upbringing.  It was through church that she learned how to read and write in Spanish.  Later, in her adulthood, Iris set a personal goal to read the Bible after taking a trip to Israel with her husband.  Determined to reach her goal, she finished reading the whole text in 100 days.  It was clear to us how influential the Bible and religion are to the leadership and support Iris provides her students each year.  Dinorella was the other text Iris shared with us.  This book takes a reptilian twist to the Cinderella fairy tale, where an empowered damsel saves a distressed duke from harm.  Iris loves reading this book with her students!  She says it's incredibly versatile and can be used for a number of reading lessons, including a "Shades of Meaning" activity that helps students build vocabulary by identifying synonyms in the text.

After these two read aloud's, Jan transitioned us to a memoir writing activity, which she launched with (just one more) read aloud.  We listened to My Great Aunt Arizona and connected the story's content about leadership to the leaders we appreciate in our own lives.  We participated in a number of pre-writing activities to activate our thinking and gather ideas for our memoir.  Next, we were given time to write our first drafts and share them with our writing partners for feedback.  We concluded as a group by reflecting on the different components of the activity and shared ideas about how we may apply this work next year with our students.

A short lunch break followed this work and we returned at 12:15 to review the schedule for the remainder of the afternoon.  We were given a forty minute free-write period, which would then be followed by a short "book talks" presentation to showcase professional texts published by Heinemann. We certainly appreciated having access to these texts through the Heinemann lending library, and look forward to reading them throughout the next two weeks.

Our last hour of the day was spent finalizing plans for our next few days together.  We organized transportation to Wednesday's "writing marathon" field trip to the Lincoln Park Zoo, discussed ideas and resources for our upcoming inquiry projects, learned more about the NWP radio event taking place July 14th, and completed exit slips to provide feedback on our second day together.