The first unit eighth graders are working on is investigative journalism. First, they learned how to be good observers to capture an event and write out what they witnessed in a “newscast”. Once they had practiced recording the 5 W’s (Who, When, What, Where, and Why), they learned to tell the story based off of the newscast event. Students discovered that what they witness may just be the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to finding out the whole story. See their first journal below. Currently, these students are working on writing stories about issues they are passionate about. Their stories will involve interviewing, researching, and planning. Stay tuned for their next journal in the coming weeks!
Our 6th/7th grade class has been working on writing powerful personal narratives. By studying published authors’ narrative techniques and studying other middle schoolers’ work, they’ve worked their way through two solid narratives and are ready to revise one of them into a polished final piece. We’ve worked on finding small moments that can be developed into interesting narratives; trying out various leads; slowing down the action to help the reader experience the event; using inner dialogue and backstory to tell a “real” story, or lessons learned; and will play around with powerful endings next week.
Our writing work extended into Social Studies as well as students researched a topic of interest in our study of early US history. Students used a published Kids Discover magazine as a model and developed their own versions. We learned some important lessons about revision when we met in small groups to apply a “critical friends” protocol: providing positive feedback as well as suggestions for improvement. Next week promises to be a week of heavy revision: re- VIEWING their work with an eye toward improvement! We look forward to sharing our final work with all of you!