May's Writing Assignment: Keepsake Stories

In the spirit of Critiques of the Week and Slice of Life stories, this month students will be required to write a "Keepsake Story" every weekend. They'll have one story due each Monday for the next four weeks. I'm sending a note home about this and explaining it to students today (we've been talking about it all week), but just so I make sure the info gets to you, here is what's on the note:

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Each Monday in May, students will be required to turn in a “Keepsake Story.” A Keepsake Story is what I call a story that gets passed down from one generation to the next.

Here’s how it works. Students will interview a family member of an older generation (parents, grandparents, etc. NOT siblings) and ask them to tell a story they remember from their childhood. It can be a story about a special event or a small story about something minor. Students should encourage the people they are interviewing to tell the story with as much detail as possible.

Then, students will write these stories down in their own words. It’s important that the students write them themselves. They should stay true to the story, but they need to use clear writing and all the skills we’ve learned this year (Using proper grammar, using proper punctuation, using quotation marks, etc. etc.).

They can turn these stories in on a sheet of paper OR (even better) type them up in Google Docs.

Stories will be due every Monday in May (the 16^th, 23^rd, 31^st—Tuesday after Memorial Day) and the first Monday in June (the 6^th). We’ll create final drafts of each one and publish them in our final class book of the year, which will make its debut at our final Publication Celebration sometime during the last week of school in June.

If you have any questions, let me know. I’m very excited about this project, and I can’t wait to read the stories!