Notice and note aha moment texts
I imagine that we will be reaching in for these as we begin our flash drafts next week and continue on to revising and publishing our memoirs.Contrasts and Contradictions – When the character does something different from what you would expect, ask yourself why the character is doing that. Still, it is rather wonderful to come to the realization that we have added the Notice & Notesignposts to our writing toolkit. There are, of course, so many connections between the work we do as readers and the work that writing demands. For example, James Howe could have asked himself “Is this the kind of man I want to be?” and through the process of coming to terms with this question he may have arrived at his realization: “I will decide for myself what kind of boy I am, what kind of man I will become”. Or, the character might gain insight through Tough Questions that he poses to himself.The writer may need a Words of the Wiser to help him/her come to a realization or have insight about something.My students had theories about how other signposts could show up, too: This is the reflective part – the writer has figured out something. Ah-ha Moments tend to show up at the end of the memoir, sometimes right after the Contrasts & Contradictions Moment.In the Cuomo memoir, it was the word “dream”, and in Howe’s it was the phrase “everything will be okay”. Again & Again words or phrases definitely point to the “big idea” or the lesson learned.
Contrasts & Contradictions showed up when the narrator was beginning to realize something important, this is where the “turn” in the memoir takes place.Memory Moments give you a bit of the writer’s history so that you “get” the problems and conflicts he/she faced.that some of the signposts were, actually, characteristic of memoir) held true.
Then we compared “Everything Will Be Okay” with our first mentor text, Mario Cuomo’s “The Blue Spruce” , to see if our theory about Notice & Notesignposts (i.e. So, we opened up a Google doc and charted this thinking in order to see if some of what we had learned in Reading Workshop could now be put to use in Writing Workshop. It was as though the proverbial lightbulb had been suddenly switched on, and suddenly there was light…and clarity about what exactly constituted memoir and differentiated it as a genre from personal narrative.Īmong their excited chatter, I could hear many of the now- familiar- to- us signposts. The room grew quiet as Colin explained his thinking.
Which I had created to anchor our Notice & Note (Kylene Beers and Bob Probst, Heinemann) thinking during our class read aloud of Priscilla Cumming’s Red Kayak. Just as I was about to say something, Colin looked up at me thoughtfully, waved his bookmark, and said: “That was an ‘Ah-ha Moment’, right? At the end there, when Howe said, ‘I will decide for myself?’” I was thrilled to see my sixth graders making note of the way in which Howe had woven in various characteristics of memoir (the mini-lesson of the day!), but less than thrilled to see that one of them was twirling around his bookmark and gazing at it in what appeared to be a distracted sort of way. We were in the midst of a lively mentor text analysis of James Howe’s “ Everything Will Be Okay” for our just-launched memoir unit.