Rambling Autobiography--A Writing Strategy

We all start the year with community building activities, but getting some diagnostic information on our students is always key.  This year, I started with the Rambling Autobiography writing strategy that I stole from a fellow teacher.

1--Start with a read aloud.  Most good days do, and you'll find that even big bad high schoolers love being read to, even though they don't always want to admit it.  I started my lesson with Incredible Me! by Kathi Applet.  It tied in perfectly to what I was trying to lead my student to think about.

2--Use a mentor text.  In this case, the strategy came with a writing sample from Linda Rief.  I put the sample on the smart board, read it out loud, and asked them what they noticed.  We talked about why it is labeled as a rambling autobiography and what they notice about the writer's structure.

3--Give them time to write and write with them.  It is so important for students to see their teachers as writers.  I gave students 4 minutes on the desktop timer (which I downloaded this morning after a simple Google search), and then I sat down with my writer's notebook.  We all wrote, using Rief's piece as a model.

4--Give them time to share.  This was structured two different ways in my two very different classes.  Honors students will typically share out loud, while other students may be self-conscious about what they wrote.  For those students, they simply traded papers after their first draft.  I, of course, willingly shared my own writing.  It is always good to let yourself be judged.

5--Revisit and rewrite.  Students went back through their first drafts to look for recurring themes or sentences that they felt were strong or interesting.  After underlining one or more sentences, students chose one of those to be their starting point for their next burst of writing, which lasted for six minutes.

6--Give feedback.  After writing two times, students traded papers with a neighbor.  Neighbors read through the second burst and gave one plus and one wish for the piece.  Students traded again, repeated the process, and then returned the paper back to the original owner.

As a class, we will take these short autobiographies and turn them into final drafts.  We will talk about final draft expectations and develop a rubric together.  Students will have time to write and I will have a solid writing sample to start the year with!