Telling Your Story

Objectives: Students will utilize the photographs to explain in writing what occurred in the photo.
Students will personalize their writing with voice, emotion, and commonly used phrases to connect the action
in the photo to the action in their own writing.

Hook: Using my photo albums, I will select a few photos to share with my corresponding story focused on personalizing my writing and creating a sense of being there through my own word choice.

Procedure: Have students tell me what I did well and what I could improve on. Use the students ideas to create the criteria for our project. Explain to the students that they will each get a digital camera to use for the weekend, and that their only job is to take as many pictures as they can about their lives. Also, explain that the pictures they take will be used to create their own book, like the one I created as a model. Then before the students can take the camera's home, I would explain the basic functions and care of the camera's and have them practice by taking pictures of one another that would be used for the author's page at the back of their books.

Follow-up: Once the students return on Monday with their cameras full of pictures, I would show them how to download the photos and create albums in meaningful categories. Students would then select a category of photos to begin composing their writing. Before each writing session, I would teach a mini-writing lesson focused on using voice and emotions in our writing to convey the mood of the actual event. Then students would be given time to utilize the skills taught in the mini-lessons in the meaningful context of writing their own stories.