Thursday, January 12, 2016

Announcements and Reminders:                            Welcome!   If you've enrolled in Creative Writing class,  look forward to doing lots of writing!   Pick your own seat for today. Needed Supplies: For Ms. Dorsey's Creative Writing class, you will need a composition book, not a spiral bound notebook, but one of the cardboard covered composition books. You'll need plenty of pens and pencils.  You're expected to come each day with your own. You'll also need to bring loose-leaf paper. Optional:  A three-ring binder (which could be used for more than one class) would help you stay organized.

Targets for Today:  Get acquainted with class procedures.

Today’s  Agenda:   For today you will pick your own seat.  1. Self-Starter On a sheet of lined paper, write a response to the picture below.  You could write a description, commentary, a poem, a brief story, or whatever you're moved to write based on that picture.    Your response should be about a half-page or so long.   Give it a title and add today's date.  Example: Flight 2. PowerPoint about How to Scribble -- with today's scribble -- and assignment:  You're in Charge.    Students signed up for a day to present a scribble (writing prompt) for the class to respond to.  Here is a link to  Ideas for Scribble Prompts. 3. Introducing the Creativity Collage Project Download and print:  About Me - Collage.doc Or pick up a copy in the classroom. Each student also received a piece of colored card stock to use for creating the collage. The Writing Process PREWRITING is what you do to get ready to write (draft). We use PREWRITING to -- Gather Ideas and Details -- Focus (narrow) the topic -- Decide on a tentative organization for the piece Much of PREWRITING happens before we start to draft (actually write it down), but we  often go back to PREWRITING activities when we need more ideas and details, or need  more focus, or decide to modify the organization. We practiced these types of prewriting. 1) Freewriting: Just start writing and write for about two minutes about anything that comes into your mind. The point is to not stop writing during those two minutes. You're not writing about anything in particular, just whatever comes to mind. If your mind goes blank, just write blank, blank, or something else. This technique will sometimes free up your mind when you have writers' block, or may generate ideas you could write about. 2) Focused freewriting:  Focus on a single topic, but go anywhere you wise with it.   roads     Again, you are going to just write for two minutes without stopping. This time, you will focus on one of these words:  red, rain, or laughter. Select one of those words, and write anything that comes to mind about that word during the two minutes. This can help you discover what you know about a subject, or help you think of different ways to look at it. laughter                                                               red rain 3) Asking questions: Select a subject you know about, then use the newspaper reporter's question words to generate information about that subject. Here's an example: Baseball: who?  players, coaches, umpires, fans, . . .  what?  play ball? bats, mound, bases, backstop, hot dogs, baseball caps, uniforms, . . .  where?  arena, field, Wrigley Field, back lot, school, . . .  why?  fun!  money for pros, fun to watch, for the hot dogs, The All-American past time,  exercise, get outside, . . .  when? summertime, night games, day games, weekends, recess, P.E., . . .  Now, you pick a topic and list answers to each of the "W's." another sport       a holiday       an event       a . . . . . .   4) Webbing: This is a sample of a web for prewriting. We created a  web for "fears." We'll do this next time:    Your Writing Process

If You Were Absent: See above for what we did.

Vocabulary:

for later: Writing helps: 

Fingers for Writing with Sensory Images

C.S. Lewis
Author's Revising
Magazines?